Requiems
by CatsOnMars
Summary: Follows the Marauders and Lily through their last year of school,focusing particularly on Sirius and how he eventually has to pay for the prank he played on Snape. A sequel to Preludes but can be read on its own too. James/Lily.
1. Helter Skelter

**requiem:** (1) a mass or hymn written for memorial and repose of one or more departed souls, usually played at funerals (2) a composition written in mourning of a deceased person

* * *

_Because I know that time is always time_

_And place is always and only one place_

_And what is actual is actual only for one time_

_And only for one place_

_Because I do not hope to turn again_

_Let these words answer_

_For what is done, not to be done again_

_May the judgement not be too heavy upon us_

_Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring_

_With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem_

_The time. Redeem_

- **"Ash Wednesday" by T.S. Eliot**

* * *

**Requiems**

Some say that whether or not someone's lot in life is sufficient for happiness can be determined by whether or not the person is happy during Christmas time. If this is true, then Sirius Black was certainly one of the most unblessed with life's joys.

He was lying sprawled on his back on the hard wood floor of his bedroom where a rather dreery-looking Christmas tree had been magicked into a corner, seemingly against its own will from the looks of it. Sirius had a small notion that his family had forgotten this was his bedroom while decorating the house for Christmas; otherwise they would have known not to waste their time. But Kreacher, the house elf, seemed to have remembered it to some extent because the tree was so crudely adorned with the least of care.

Christmas had come and passed and Sirius had hardly acknowledged it, sleeping in most of the day. His friends had sent him his presents by owl, and his mother eventually had to come in and throw something at him to make him wake up because she was sick of accepting his packages for him. Later he found the object she had thrown at him to be a shrinking paperweight, possibly the worst magic gift someone could give, and was flattered that his mother had gotten it as a present that morning and so quickly decided to pass it on to him. After all, there were some people who would be giving him presents late, but for the most part he wouldn't be getting many gifts this Christmas, as usual.

But today was the day that the Black family celebrated the most during the winter. Traditionally his relatives would unceremoniously spend Christmas at their own homes, and then on New Year's Eve Sirius's entire extended family would reunite at his house to exchange late presents, have a big dinner, and then get drunk enough for the disgusting heinousness of their personalities to become too clear for Sirius to watch without getting sick with the realization that he was related to these people.

Many, many times Sirius had regretted not taking up the Potters offer to let him stay with them during the holiday this time. In fact, when he had told James that he was going home for Christmas even though he didn't have to, he had looked at Sirius like he'd just said that Satan was an awfully pleasant guy to hang out with. But there was really only one reason that Sirius endured being with his family during the reunions, and in the end it always managed to make it worth it in one way or another.

There were no windows in Sirius's bedroom, so whenever he heard someone arrive he had no way of looking out to see who it was unless he wanted to leave the room and remind the other people in the house that he existed, which would only result in them giving him a hard time. But eventually he heard the voice talking downstairs that he had been waiting to hear all day.

"Hello. Where is everyone?"

"Andromeda," Sirius heard his cousin Narcissa say, ignoring her question. "I'm surprised to see you. Mother didn't think you'd be coming."

She didn't sound exactly pleased about her sister being there.

"Oh," Andromeda said pleasantly, paying no attention to the lack of enthusiasm for her arrival. "Well, I haven't seen you guys and mum for a while, you know...Where's Sirius?"

"I don't know," Narcissa said without a single note of care in her voice. She and Andromeda talked unanimatedly for only a few more seconds before Sirius had left his room and was coming quietly down the stairs. Andromeda seemed to know he was standing at the bottom of them, because as soon as her sister left the landing area she turned and smiled at him.

"Well, if it isn't my favorite cousin," she said. "Come here and let me look at you."

Andromeda Black was the only person related to Sirius that he had met who he liked. She was twenty-three and looked a little like a pixie, though she also resembled a tall and skinny boy with her sandy blond hair cut very short. From ending up in many situations in which they were the only decent people to talk to, they had become more like brother and sister than cousins. In fact, the only reason Sirius ever stayed around at family reunions was because he was able to ignore everyone else and talk to Andromeda instead. They usually stayed very closely in touch to decide which ones they would simultaneously show up for and which ones they would both skip. She was the one who had given him his flying motorcycle for his sixteenth birthday, which he had since used many times without ever bothering to get a license to fly it.

"You are getting so _tall_...look at this," Andromeda marveled with enthusiasm, messing with his nearly shoulder-length hair. "I'm still waiting for you to write to me about a girlfriend one of these days. Tell me you have one."

He shrugged. "Sure. I have, you know...girlfriends."

"Not like that," she scolded. "I mean the kind whose names you remember after having a couple snogs with them, at least."

Sirius laughed. "What about you?"

"We'll see," she said, putting her hands together and starting to fidget with them a little.

"Oh, come on. I hate it when you're all mysterious like that."

"Usually I'm just bluffing and have nothing to tell you about at all. Haven't you figured that out by now?" He thought he saw her take something off of her finger and hide it in her pocket, but when she went on talking he forgot about it. "Hey, how about helping me unload the car?"

"Unload the what?" Sirius asked, his voice elevating in surprise.

"I have a car now. Didn't you hear me landing?"

"It's a flying one?"

"Of course. We Blacks are strictly magical," she started in an impression of a typical member of their family. "We don't need any useless Muggle technology influencing our traditional and much more sufficient ways of life."

She had barely finished saying that by the time Sirius was headed out the front door to look at her car outside. It was a tiny, two-seater convertible with its lid up. It had an off-white color and gleamed brightly in the sunlight. It somehow seemed to fit Andromeda perfectly.

"Andy, since when did you...?"

"I'll tell you about it later," she dismissed. "Let's just get my stuff inside."

They unloaded all of her bags from the trunk and then Sirius was looking at the car thoughtfully. "Hey, I want to try something."

"What?"

Sirius got his wand out, pointed it at the top of the car and encanted, "_Alohomora_."

The hood of the car immediately opened up to reveal the inside.

"Nice leather," Sirius noted, looking at the seats. Then he noticed something sitting in the passenger seat: a big box wrapped in metallic green paper and white ribbon.

"I wonder what that could be," Andromeda said in her mysterious voice that he found annoying.

"Is it...?" He pointed at it unsurely, looking at her.

"Go on, have at it. Merry Christmas."

Sirius seized the package and started tearing at the paper. Inside was a leather case with a carrying handle that snapped shut, square-shaped and a little bigger around than a dinner plate.

"A suitcase?" he asked more in confusion than dissapointment, but then he opened it up and gasped. There was a round circular disk on the bottom and small speakers on two sides of the top lid. "This is a...! What do you call it...?" Sirius spouted in excitement. "It's a _turnable_!"

"Turntable," Andromeda corrected with a smile.

"But...I don't have any records!"

"You don't yet. But from now on, I'm going to send you a bunch every Christmas. Believe me, Muggle music is the best nowadays. I think they're way ahead of us with these record albums."

"Oh, you don't have to tell me that." Sirius stopped. "Wait. What do you mean you're going to _send_ me records?"

"Never mind," she said, seeming a little nervous for a moment. "Anyway, you can learn how to play this with a spell instead of electricity so you can use it at the school without it going spastic on you. All you have to do is make it rotate and use an amplifying spell."

Sirius laughed at her description of how electronic devices would malfunction if used on the school grounds. "Good, cause there's no way I can use it here. Mum would do the old AK on me if she suddenly heard rock music coming from my room."

Sirius's mother had slapped him across the head just a few days ago for wearing a pair of sunglasses around the house which he'd bought because they were just likes ones he'd seen Jim Morrison, the singer of his favorite Muggle band, wearing in a picture once. He couldn't imagine what she'd do if she found something in his possession reeking of Muggle culture as much as a turntable.

"Geez, Andy...Thanks. I love it," he said. "Hey, you should come upstairs and see everything else I got. Unless you actually want to go in the cellar and visit with your ugly stepsisters."

She laughed. "Why do you call them that? They're my real sisters, and a hell of a lot more beautiful than they deserve to be, I'd say."

Sirius wrinkled his nose. "Oh, I don't know about that. Bella wears way too much make-up so her eyes are always so shadowy. And Narcissa might look okay if she didn't have that snobby look on her face all the time."

"Well, I'll take it as a compliment as much as I can."

They went up to Sirius's room where he showed her all the presents he'd gotten. James had sent him a chaotic board game called Dud, which involved trading wands back and forth between players so that someone was always left with the cheap dysfunctional one that came with the set, making it almost impossible to play their turns successfully. Peter had given him a large bag of Drooble's gum and a long roll of edible parchment, which Sirius liked to use to write "confidential" notes to James that always ended with messages like "Eat this as soon as you receive it to ensure complete secrecy." Just for good measure, he had added a couple pairs of twin parchments, pieces of paper that would each read whatever was written on the other so that two people could use them to write notes to eachother without having to pass them. Lily had sent him a book of photos and descriptions of old cars because one Muggle thing that he was very interested in was automobiles, and he liked to study the names of the models. Finally, he had gotten somewhat of a prank gift from Remus, a kind of compass which had a red hand that would glow and point in the direction of any female that was currently looking his way or thinking about him. Andromeda laughed a lot at the idea that someone would get him some kind of "babe radar," while Sirius tried to tell her she didn't even realize how funny it was since she didn't know Remus, who did not exactly have the most prominent sense of humor of everyone in his circle of friends.

"So how is James, by the way?" she asked him later, helping herself to some of his gum on the bed. Andromeda had been a Seventh Year when Sirius and James started going to Hogwarts, and James was the only friend of his she was very familiar with.

"Oh, he's pretty good," Sirius answered. Then he put his hands to his face and batted his eyelashes girlishly. "He's in _love_," he said with humorous emphasis.

"Really," she said curiously.

"Yeah. He's completely clueless about it, though. He finally realizes that he likes her, but that's about it."

"Maybe he's just not solely interested in shagging girls like you are."

"Hey, excuse me! What evidence do you have that I behave that way?"

"What other kind of person would get a compass like that as a prank gift?"

"Oh, shut up," Sirius said, throwing a pillow at her.

This, of course, turned into an extensive pillow fight complete with screaming laughter, which was undoubtably of great annoyance to anyone near enough in the house to hear them, until they both got tired and sat back down.

"You seem kind of different," Sirius noted after they had been resting in silence for a minute.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. It's like I can't decide whether you're acting happier or sadder than when I saw you last year. But it's one of the two." He looked at her unbreakingly for a moment. "There's something you're not telling me."

She stood up from the bed and bit her fingers, but said nothing.

"Andy?" he pressed.

"Not right now, alright?" She didn't seem to be hiding something just to get on his nerves now. She sounded very serious.

No one bothered to come and get them when it was time for dinner, but they could tell when the time was getting near just from the smell of the food that drifted upstairs. For ten minutes or so they went down to the living room where they were eyed contemptuously by their relatives but rarely spoken to, and then finally everyone started to gather at the very long table in the dining room.

The middle of the table was where Andromeda's family ended up gathered. Narcissa and Bellatrix sat with their mother on one side, across from Sirius's mother. His father was next to her, who seemed to be stemming off into a male section of the table. The grouping of women away from men was too perfect for the ensuing of gossip for Sirius to be very comfortable with. But there were two empty seats by Sirius's mother. Andromeda, all nerves of steal, went over and sat in one of them so that she faced her mother and sisters, and Sirius sat next to her.

"Well, well," mused Bellatrix, looking them over. "The two white sheep of the Black family."

Bellatrix, who was about Sirius's age, was wearing a tight and low-cut red velvet dress and black nylons adding a dark tint to her shapely legs, and her raven hair fell in rich curls at the bottom. Her younger sister Narcissa was all in black, looking suffocated by her lace choker because of the lack of color in her face, and giving an altogether tightened look with her pale blond hair pulled up. Sirius's aunt Elladora wore sinisterly formal robes of burgundy and a doll-like mask of make-up to hide her real age. Looking at the three, he couldn't believe Andy was so closely related to any one of them. It was like someone must have switched his aunt's child at birth.

As everybody ate, Sirius and Andromeda were allowed to stay invisible but were regarded just enough to be passed platters of food. While eating with the delicate nature and manners of royalty, the Blacks engaged in monotonous and unbearably shallow conversation that was so obnoxious to Sirius's ears that he started to stab at his food savagely as if it was all he could do to keep from lashing out and shouting at all of them. It was especially difficult for him to sit calmly when the subject came up of all of the Death Eater stories covered in the news lately.

"You know, it is unfortunate how many perfectly dignified people's lives are being threatened by these protests," Sirius's mother remarked, "but this is the price we're going to have to pay for the wrongs that have remained present in our society for far too long."

"Quite right you are," said Sirius's uncle Altus. "These Death Eaters, as they're called - what a ridiculous name - may not be very subtle about showing their ideals, but I suppose it's what you have to do to get anyone to pay attention. Hell, I can't think of any time in history when reform didn't come without some kind of sacrifice. But it is always for the better in the end, right?"

After the feast was over Sirius resorted to stuffing balls of the gum Peter had given him into his mouth and chewing it angrily since he had no more food to abuse. It was practically forbidden for anyone to rise from the table for at least another half-hour just because the adults would now enjoy some wine, so everyone carried on in the same way. Eventually Andromeda looked to the side at Sirius and her eyes widened; he had put more than ten balls of Drooble's in his mouth and a gigantic wad of gum was bulging in the side of his cheek as he chewed vigorously.

Sirius had just managed to tune out what his family was talking about and make small conversation with Andromeda when Bellatrix boredly looked over at the two of them. "So how's dear little Evans?" she asked in a fake sweet voice.

"You can shut up about her," Sirius responded automatically, hardly even looking up at Bellatrix.

"What?" Andromeda asked confusedly. "Who's Evans?"

"It's nothing. Lily Evans, she's just a friend of mine," he told her off-handedly.

She thought for a moment. "Oh! Your car book friend?"

"His Mudblood friend," Bellatrix emphasized darkly.

Andromeda looked across the table at her sister with a sharp and icy glare that could only express loathing as intense and personal as that for a sibling. "Now really, do we have to use language like that at a dinner table?"

Sirius knew she was imitating the way her mother used to act when she and her sisters used to get into screaming arguments at dinner. He looked at her, then at Bellatrix, and then back, and then noticed that the table had gone a little more quiet than before and many of the guests were peering down the table at them.

"Well, it's no surprise that Sirius has become such a retchedexample of this family," Elladora said to Andromeda, "seeing as you've had such a bad influence on him ever since he was very young. No offense to you, Lenora," she added quickly to Sirius's mother. "No one can deny you did your best with him."

Sirius chewed his gum extra loudly.

"If Sirius has grown up to be the way he is because of me at all, I'm immensely proud of it," stated Andromeda stoically.

"Oh, honestly, Andromeda," her mother sighed in exasperation. "He may even be lower than you." She started to uncork a wine bottle to pour herself a second glass. "A Black...befriending such worthless filth of people like that...It's unheard of. Could he sink any lower?"

Sirius straightened up in his seat as if he had sat on something sharp. "My friend is _not_-"

But Andromeda grabbed his arm to make him calm down, and when he looked at her she had an expression like he'd never seen in her eyes before. She looked so determined and serious that she didn't have to say anything for him to know to sit back and let her handle the situation.

Andromeda took in a deep breath. "Actually," she said, her voice almost sounding a little shaky, "I'm even worse than him." She was fumbling her hand around in her pocket, but Sirius got a feeling this wasn't a nervous habit. Something was going on, and it suddenly worried him very much.

"What are you talking about, Andromeda?" Elladora asked with some impatience.

Sirius glanced to the side at her lap and then turned his whole head to look, his eyes widening. She was putting a gold ring on her left hand. Slowly, she lifted it so that Elladora could see. "I'm married, mother."

A kind of choking, solitary laugh escaped Sirius as his gum flew from his mouth onto the table cloth. But no one else reacted visibly; it just became horrifyingly quiet.

Elladora swallowed. "Surely you mean...you've gotten engaged."

Andromeda shook her head. "No. We eloped. Two months ago."

"...I see. And...who is your husband?"

"He's a photographer for the _Daily Prophet_. We met when I went to apply for that writing job."

"What do I care about that? What's his name?"

"Tonks. Ted Tonks."

"Tonks," repeated Altus in a mildly curious tone, as if he was deceiving himself into thinking this was a light and pleasant discussion. "I've never heard of that family. What kind of people are they? Foreign?"

"Well," Andromeda said. "Mostly, they're...Muggles."

Elladoras wine glass shattered in her tight grip. Now the table erupted into exclamations of shock. Sirius turned to Andromeda and glared at her in a very different kind of surprise than most people there were now expressing. "Two months ago?! Why didn't you ever tell me anything about it?"

"I'm sorry, Sirius. I just wasn't ready to bring it out in the open yet-"

"Andromeda," Elladora said in somewhat of a low growl which somehow vibrated underneath the loudness of the crowd so that she heard it. "I hope you're damn grateful that your father isn't alive to see you now! You're right, you're worse than a Mudblood lover like him," she said with a deadly look at Sirius. "You're a shameful, absolutely _disposable _blood traitor!"

"I assume that with all of this now established," Sirius's mother said to her coldly, "you don't intend for your stay here to be very long."

"Oh no," Andromeda assured her. "I'm leaving tomorrow morning."

From everyone's reaction, it was clear that that wouldn't be nearly soon enough for them. As they all glared at her hatefully, Sirius stared at the tabletop, feeling like all of his shock and anger mixed together was going to make him explode any moment now.

"Well," said Elladora, "you can leave then. And you can never come back again to any gatherings of this family, and I don't care to ever see you again either. I hope you enjoy your life with your filthy disease of a husband, because as of now you will never be a part of this family again."

"Yes, I know that," Andromeda said calmly. "That's why I came here at all, you see. I came to say goodbye to you all."

All of the people at the table were apparently infuriated by her indifference to everything her mother said to try to make her feel guilty. And soon she was standing up from her chair looking quite unaffected by all of the chaos she had fueled at this dinner.

"I'll just go upstairs now," she said. "I think I've had enough to eat."

And as she left the place where she had been sitting, Sirius automatically rose to follow her.

"Sirius, you sit down!" his mother commanded.

He ignored her and pushed his chair back so he could walk out from in front of it.

"Sirius Roderick Black!" she shouted. "I forbid you to follow her!" Her words had now stopped Andromeda in her tracks and she was standing in the entrance to the dining room, watching. "You need not mind her anymore. You _will_ not. And you will not speak to her again. It's time you grew out of the nonsense the both of you have in your heads. Now sit down."

"I will sit down and get up when I want to!" Sirius roared, the anger that had collected in him all night finally coming out. "And I'll speak to whoever I damn well want to!"

"Not anymore! SIT DOWN!"

Sirius turned and started to walk from his chair.

"You ungrateful brat!" she screamed after him. "I should have known a long time ago that there was no fixing you. You're an incorrigible disappointment! You should be on your knees thanking me for putting up with you this long, feeding you and raising you. But if I was smart I would have kicked you out of this house a long time ago."

Sirius had slowed his pace of walking, and now stopped and whirled around. "Well, let me save you the trouble then! I'm leaving!"

A small pause of silence passed. Then Lenora started to laugh hysterically. "You?! _Leave?!_"

Andromeda's sisters started to giggle as well as she said it.

"And where exactly are you going to go?" she asked.

"Well, I don't know," he said. "And I don't really care. It doesn't matter. Anywhere is better than here."

"Sirius!" Andromeda gasped, coming back into the dining room. "You're being crazy. It's the middle of winter. You don't have anywhere to go!"

"Yeah, Sirius," Bellatrix said in a mocking, high-pitched voice, as she and Narcissa tried to contain laughing fits. "Don't leave us."

"Why shouldn't I go?" Sirius demanded of Andromeda, and then turned to his family and pointed to her. "She was the only thing I liked about this family, and now she's not even a part of it anymore. By all means, I'll be glad to stay if you can give me one reason I shouldn't leave right now."

"Fine," his mother said stiffly. "Leave. The both of you in one night; it's good riddance if I ever knew it. But when you come back here begging for me and your father to take you in again because you're starving and freezing to death, you can forget about it and turn right back around."

"Believe me, that's not going to happen." With that he turned and left the dining room, and Andromeda followed him.

"Sirius, I can't believe you're doing this! Just because I jumped into something a little quickly, it doesn't mean you have to-"

"Don't waste your time taking responsibility for this," Sirius said as they went into the landing area, which was dimly lit above by a chandelier with candles in it. "This is my decision. I just can't take it anymore. The way they were talking to you in there...No matter how hard I try to live with it, I can't just..."

"I know." She looked down at the floor quietly. "Funny, the two of us standing here, actually believing that it takes nothing but a fly away on a broomstick and we can be rid of our family forever. As if it's something you can just sever away from yourself, like getting a divorce."

Sirius looked at her sadly, and could only sigh. "So what's this guy like, anyway?"

"Ted?" she asked, starting to smile again. "Oh, he's great. You've got to meet him some day. I've learned so much about Muggles from him - it's so _interestng, _it almost makes me feel like I could be happy never doing magic again. We're going to go to America and Canada as a kind of late honeymoon. They're the most devoid of magical establishments of all places in the world. It's going to be be great."

Sirius smiled. "So that's how you have a car now, and suddenly know where to come by a turntable."

Andromeda nodded. "Oh, Siri," she sighed, using the name she hadn't called him since he was six. "I can't tell you how happy I am, though. You probably can't tell, but I really am. I feel like Ted's rescued me in a way. I've felt a kind of freedom in the past two months like nothing I ever could have imagined." She abandoned her reverie and looked at him again, patting a hand on his shoulder and keeping it there. "You know, Sirius, I am so proud of what you've become. And I don't mean in spite of the kind of influence you've had to put up with. And I don't mean how much you've become like me. I mean who you are just on your own, as a person."

"Stop it, Andy," Sirius said.

"Oh, come here." She brought him into a tight hug. As he hugged her Sirius realized that he was a little taller than her; he could remember vividly when he was young and she had been the taller one. And now she, his cousin Andromeda, was married. Where had the time gone? There had been no gradual transition. He could have sworn a couple hours ago in his bedroom she had still been the young girl he used to play games with, and then at a dinner table everything had come out and everything had changed, just like that.

Andromeda tried to convince him to wait and leave with her the next day, saying she and her husband would figure out a way to get him back to school when the time came. But Sirius was insistent about going to the Potters. All of the disorder that had happened tonight was starting to make him really want to see his best friend again. However, his biggest concern was that if he left with Andromeda in her car he would have no way of taking his motorcycle along, and all of the possessions he left with tonight would have to be the only ones he kept.

So Sirius went to his room and started getting his things together. It didn't take long, because most of his valued things had been left in his dormitory at Hogwarts. The most important thing he took was the turntable, which was held in a corner of his small suitcase by surrounding wadded-up clothes. He strapped the suitcase securely to the back seat of his motorcycle and then said a final goodbye to Andromeda.

"I suppose it could be a while before we see eachother again," he said.

Andromeda smiled unhappily. "I will write to you all the time. And if you do ever need a place to stay, or anything at all, you just send me an owl." She rubbed her hand over his head affectionately, messing up his hair. "Now, you keep having fun. But try not to get into too much trouble."

Sirius nodded. Andromeda stepped back and waved as he got ready to drive away. And then from the inside of the Black house, everyone heard the roaring of a motorcycle and the sound of it ripping away down the road, which was shortly followed by a sudden silence when it lifted from the ground, as if it had disappeared completely along with him.


	2. Gimme Shelter

James rolled over in bed and looked at the clock on his nightstand. The numbers forming 1:36 burned his eyes, the only thing giving off light in the whole room. It had been 1978 for more than an hour and a half.

James's holiday had been pleasant but not exactly thrilling. He was an only child and had no friends away from school, and though he liked being at home with his parents, his days of Christmas break were getting increasingly dull. It had been easy to deal with, though, whenever he thought about what Sirius was having to go through. Clearly bored out his mind or having to do something to distract himself from going insane at his house, Sirius had sent him four letters ever since the beginning of the holiday. The last one had had a tone of unsureness about what the point of writing to him was, and had said only the following:

"Dear Mr. Prongs,

Yes. Well.

I would say that I hope you had a good Christmas, only Im already sure that you did. Even if you think it was just okay, you don't know what you're talking about and how much I'd gladly trade places with you.

Regulus keeps looking over my shoulder to see what I'm writing. God, it's annoying having him at school now, isn't it? At least he's in a different house (big surprise) and as far away from me as possible. He was looking around in my room earlier when I wasn't there. I think he wants to steal some of my presents I got from you and everyone. I wish I could hide them somewhere but my bedroom has close to nothing in it anymore.

Oh, I've kept forgetting to ask you every time Remus isn't around: What's going on with him and that girl Matilda? He seems to be talking to her a lot. Have you had any communication with Lily since school got out? I bet he's opened up to her about it. She probably knows everything.

Write back as soon as you get this. -Padfoot"

James had not heard from Lily since the holidays started, or from anyone else besides Sirius, with the exception of getting all his friends presents sent to him. He had thought about writing to all of his friends but had never gotten around to it.

But he had found himself thinking about Lily an awful lot.

It didn't seem like a long time ago at all that the incident with Snape had, in a strange way of effect, brought out the true nature of their feelings for each other, when they had merely been friends before. Since then he had gotten to know Lily much better. This had included becoming familiar with the more concealed and undelicate but quite likeable things about her, like the way she would put an entire half of a biscuit in her mouth at the same time but still chew it with her mouth closed, and how she wore a surprisingly unfeminine set of plaid pajamas to bed, and how she was so unconscious of herself that she was comfortable hanging around in the common room in her pajamas with the boys sometimes. All of these details about her were comfortable memories he had referred to often when he was bored, and maybe even a little lonely, ever since he had come home for Christmas.

James heard something tap his window. He sat up, yawning, assuming that it was an owl delivering another letter from Sirius, probably asking him why he hadn't written back yet (James had started a fourth response letter but by then had completely run out of things to write to him about). He got out of bed, swearing when he stepped on the hard corner of a gift box on his floor just as the owl tapped louder on his window.

But when James looked out his window, there was no owl outside of it at all. In complete confusion he searched the sky for any movement. Then he looked at the ground and his jaw dropped.

"Good God."

Sirius was in his yard outside waving his arms to get his attention. In the snow beside him were several black rocks he had collected from the front of the house to throw at his window, obviously expecting that James would be asleep and that it would take a lot more than two.

James motioned to him that he would let him in the front door and went downstairs to unlock it. When he opened the door Sirius was standing there shaking with cold, his suitcase beside him.

"Sirius, what the bloody hell?" he tried to say quietly enough to avoid waking up his parents. "Get inside, you look half dead."

"Wait. Open your garage first."

"Why?"

"So I can put my bike in it."

James's facial expression became more shocked, if it was possible. "You brought your _motorcycle?"_

"How else would I have gotten here?"

"You've got some serious explaining to do, mate. Come on."

They put Sirius's motorcycle inside and then quietly crept into James's room. Sirius had used a warming charm on his clothes for the fly over, but it had only helped so much, so James made sure he was wrapped in many layers of blankets before he started asking about the reason he was here.

"Look, I'm sorry about this," Sirius apologized. "But something completely unexpected happened...I got mad...I just had to get away from there."

"It's alright, I understand. But I don't even get why you went home in the first place anyway."

"Andy," he explained simply. "She made me promise I'd come this time. She said it was important to her. If only I'd known exactly what her plans were."

"What do you mean?" James asked. "What happened?"

Sirius explained the whole story about the nightmarish event at the dinner table, but he left out the part about dismissing himself from his family forever because he didn't want James to think he was asking to stay here. He wasn't sure how he was going to ask that of him if it ended up being his only option.

"Well...what can I say?" James said after hearing the story. "I can't blame you. Wow. So she had to completely sacrifice her family just because she wants to be with this guy? I can't even begin to imagine...I guess I could never understand what your family's like without living in that house myself. Cause I never realized it was that bad." James put his legs up on the bed and hugged them to him, resting his chin on his knees.

Sirius looked to the side at him. "I'm sorry about just barging in like this. But I didn't think about what I would do. I just knew I couldn't stay there."

"I told you, it's fine. My parents wanted you to stay here anyway. I just didn't expect you to show up outside my window."

"No, Prongs, I mean...Never mind. Forget it."

James looked at him confusedly for a moment, and then started talking in a more excited tone that surprised Sirius. "Wait a minute. You're saying...you didn't just leave to get away from them and cool down. You're running away. You didn't just come here for-"

"Don't be ridiculous, I couldn't ask that of your parents."

"But that's why you came here, isn't it?"

"It's just for a while. We're going right back to school anyway, and by the time we graduate I can figure something out."

"Oh, don't be an idiot. Don't you _want _to move in with me?"

"Of course I'd want to move in with you, but your parents-"

"They'd be more than happy to take you in. They know all about your family. Well, no one knows _all_ about your family. But enough to be quite approving of you running away. And they like you."

Sirius crossed his arms thoughtfully. "Well. Your mom _is_ a damn good cook."

James laughed. "Why didn't we think of this sooner?"

He shrugged. "No kidding. Why didn't my cousin meet Ted Tonks sooner?"

"His name is Ted Tonks? Blimey, I can already tell he's perfect for her."

They stayed up the rest of the night playing a game of Dud, which was humorously pointless with two players, trying to keep their laughs down to a volume that wouldn't wake up James's parents. Then they put blankets on the floor for Sirius to sleep on, lay down to go to bed, and turned out the lights. Just before dozing off James whispered, "Sirius?"

"Yes?" he murmured tiredly.

"Are you...I mean...Are you okay?"

"Of course I'm okay," he said right away as if it was a ridiculous question. "I'm just mad."

But James knew his friend better than that. "Padfoot?"

"What?!" he whispered, obviously exhausted and trying to get to sleep.

"Happy New Year."

"...Oh. You, too."

It was almost 3:00 when they were finally asleep.

* * *

"Hendrix!" Sirius demanded, frolicking into James's room the next morning after taking a shower. "Now!" 

James had been awake for a few minutes and sat up in bed, yawning. "Isn't it a little early for that?" he asked, looking at his clock.

"So we'll wake the house up with a bang. Come on."

He pulled James out of bed by the arm and they went into the spare room in the house which was used as a combination office and "music room." This room was one of Sirius's favorite things about staying with the Potters. James's dad was a Halfblood, and one with very fine taste, so he had quite a large and varied music collection. Every time Sirius visited he invited himself to play the Doors, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and even Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley as loud as it was possible to without getting complaints from the neighbors.

If either of James's parents had not been awake before, they were as soon the house came alive with electric guitar played at full blast at 8:40. Knowing that they were being annoying and could get yelled at extensively by his mother for this seemed to give James a nervous kind of excitement, and he dropped to the floor laughing as Sirius hyperly jumped around the room in a movement almost resembling dancing, flinging water off of his hair that was still wet from his shower. They stayed in the room for a while, afraid to come out because of what they were doing and because neither of James's parents had seen that Sirius was there yet. After a while they heard a banging around of pans in the kitchen that told them Mrs. Potter was making breakfast, and heard Mr. Potter singing along to the music in the shower.

The two went downstairs, hardly having to creep around because the music covered the sound of their footsteps. Jane Potter, a lanky and delicately built but strong-minded woman with dark hair, was at the stove making pancakes. Sirius snuck up behind her and pointed to a big one in the pan, saying, "I get that one."

She smirked. "Hello, Sirius."

His shoulders fell in disappointment. "I was supposed to surprise you. How did you know I was here?"

"Are you kidding? Who in this family would begin the day by playing Jimi Hendrix as an alarm clock?"

"James would if he knew how to make a mate proud."

"So we did wake you up," James inferred, sitting at the table.

"Not your dad, but me," she informed.

"Sorry, Mrs. P," Sirius said, using the shortened name he always called her which wasn't completely informal but still didn't take a long time to say.

"Oh, that's alright. It was kind of an early morning rush. And a pleasant surprise; it's nice to have you here."

"Nice to be here," he told her. "I don't get to spend much time in a house where the old lady wouldn't do the AK on me for what I did this morning."

"Call me an old lady again and that's gonna change," she said, jokingly holding her spatula up to him as if to slap him with it.

"AK?" James questioned, the only one who had caught the senselessness of what Sirius had just said.

"Yeah, as in 'Avada Kedavra,'" Sirius explained. "Sorry, I forget it's only Andy and I who say that."

Eventually James's father came downstairs in his bathrobe and whacked Sirius on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. "So it's you who used up all the hot water. What do you think you're doing with your 'Voodoo Child' wake-up call, huh?"

"Oh, admit it," joked Sirius, who got along with Mr. Potter very well. "You know you loved it. We could hear you singing from the other end of the hall."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said with a hidden smile.

The others all laughed. Mr. Potter turned to his wife, said, "Morning," and kissed the top of her head in greeting before sitting down at the table with the two boys.

Jane and Michael Potter had always represented for Sirius a kind of happiness that was unattainable in his life. They were not a picture-perfect couple by most people's standards, and argued a lot when they thought James and Sirius couldn't hear them. But it was still always obvious that they were madly in love. Compared to what usually went on in Sirius's house, their arguments were loving and affectionate talk.

Mrs. Potter had the magic radio station on, which had a wizard telling the news of an accident involving Apparition that had resulted in a woman stuck two feet from the ground with half of her body inside a building. As she was putting the pancakes on everyone's plates, all of them suddenly became silent as they heard what the wizard on the radio spoke of next.

"...And the frightful subject that has everyone in the magic community concerned: the Death Eaters. All that has been known about these mysterious underground collaborators is that they are a terrorist group trying to bring attention to their ideals that Pureblood wizards and witches are rightfully the dominant members of magic society. It is even possible that what they want is complete isolation from supposedly 'unpure' witches and wizards like Halfbloods and Muggle-borns. The idea that these kinds of people are undeserving of their place in the magic world has been regarded as unprincipled nonsense for the majority of our history, which is what makes the Death Eaters messages so intimidating. Varying in exact words, a written statement is usually left at the scenes of all their attacks demanding cleansing of the government and our society. There are often few or no survivors at the government establishments that the Death Eaters attack, but one thing always marks these scenes as the same: a skull with a serpent slithering through it, left suspended in the air like a foreboding warning.

"But as of late, new information is being uncovered which leads many to suspect that this terrorist group is something much deeper than meets the eye. Many Death Eaters captured by the Ministry have given the name Voldemort as the leader they claim to serve. The Death Eaters show blind and unbreakable loyalty to him, and some even swear that with the help of his followers this Voldemort is going to take over everything and that there is nothing that can be done about it.

"Ministry official Barty Crouch recently said to one of our interviewers, 'Most are viewing these Death Eaters as reformers. But I believe that they aren't interested in changing our views and simply want us to submit to their wishes, whether or by will or by force. The destruction of Ministry workplaces that has made us all notice them is just a warning for what is to come. I think that these Death Eaters are holding something back. They seem to know that they can and will succeed in what they're doing, and it is even possible that these attacks are merely warnings of how capable they will be of destroying us if we get in the way of what they want. Perhaps this Voldemort is their secret weapon; for whoever he is, he must be very powerful for all of these people to be serving him. It is of great importance that this group not be taken lightly. We will make the followers that we have give us the information we can use to crush them before they get close to what their real intentions are.'

"Meanwhile, some are talking about and even volunteering for efforts against Voldemort and his followers. Richard Karlstein, chief Auror at the Ministry of Protection from Dark Arts, and Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, are among some who are willing to form a group of protectors to infiltrate and destroy the Death Eaters. More information on this will be reported as it is found."

Mrs. Potter started moving again, going to the cupboard and then putting a bottle of maple syrup on the table. "There's your syrup," she said before sitting down. "The butter's out on the counter behind Michael there." There was a moment of awkward silence at the table, but soon they started talking casually again. No one asked Sirius why he was here. He was very grateful.


	3. Ticket To Ride

Sirius was happy during every moment he spent at the Potters in the last days off of school. His time with only James was always a little different than the time he spent with all of his friends. Living in the house together, they were like brothers, hardly having to talk to each other and simply understanding what was on each other's minds even as they relaxed in total silence. Whenever they were at Hogwarts with Remus, Peter, and Lily, this kind of closeness always ended up pacified in the midst of the unneeded chatter and noise required for communication between five different individuals. But during the time they were at James's house and were out all day playing practical jokes on strangers and up all night watching bad horror movies, Sirius's relationship with James was clearly defined as one of the only true family ties he had.

But in a very mean and seizing way, the time to go back to school eventually crept up on them. James was a little more happy to be going back than Sirius was, and Sirius knew exactly why but wasn't in high enough spirits to tease him about it.

Mr. and Mrs. Potter walked them up to the passageway into Platform Nine and Three Quarters, helping them carry their things. James kissed his mother and then said, "Dad, can I talk to you over there for a moment?" He took him aside just out of earshot of Sirius and his mother.

"Er...I was just wondering...Once the school year's over, is it okay if Sirius comes home with us?" he asked.

His dad shrugged. "Of course. But if he's going to stay with us right afterward, won't he-"

"No, I don't mean for a visit. I mean for good."

His expression became concerned. "Well, I don't know, James. Your mum and I have no legal right to take him in, if you're saying that he's run away or something like that."

"No, they kicked him out...And he ran away. It's kind of a combination of both, I don't know. But they'd never let him come back. They've probably forgotten about him already."

His dad looked over his shoulder at Sirius, who was conversing with a girl from school who had just come up beside him and James's mother. "Alright. It'll work out somehow. While you're still at school we'll have time to buy him some things we'll need if we're to have another son around for a while. He can't be sleeping on your floor all the time."

James nodded, and then his dad patted him on the shoulder. "You stay out of trouble, you hear?"

With that James bounded back over to his friend, and his dad followed behind him and said, "Hey, Sirius, I've got something for you."

Sirius looked up at him, caught off guard. "For me?"

"Yeah." He handed Sirius a grocery bag. "They're all your favorites, I believe."

Inside the bag was a pile of at least a dozen record albums. Sirius peered into it and the Beach Boys' faces were looking up at him on the top of the stack.

"You're not _giving_ these to me?" he questioned in a state of shock.

"Why not? You use them more than I do," he said. "And James told me you have a record player now, but nothing to play on it yet."

"Yeah, but..."

"Oh, take it and get out of here before I think I'll miss them and change my mind."

That made Sirius agree to the idea much faster. "Mr. P...Thanks." And he turned and said to James, "Let's get out of here."

They ran through the wall with all of their things and in seconds were standing before the gleaming Hogwarts Express and surrounded by other students about to get on.

"Padfoot!" someone called immediately. "Prongs! Hey!"

Peter was hustling over to them, weighed down by the bulging bag over his shoulder. Remus and a girl from Hufflepuff had been standing with him, and the both of them quietly followed Peter at a more relaxed speed.

"Wormtail," Sirius said as he reached them. "I can see you had a generous Christmas."

"Why?"

"You've been getting into the sweets, obviously."

"I always look like this."

"...Oh," Sirius said, getting a disapproving shove from James who knew he was teasing him on purpose.

"Hello, everyone," Remus said tiredly. "Let's not talk about Christmas. I'm going into a post-holiday winter depression."

The girl standing with him laughed gently. She was a seventh year girl that Remus had started talking to often this year, whose name was Madelin, not Matilda as Sirius had unobservantly stated in his letter to James. She was more than a head shorter than Remus and had a thin figure that made her about as harmless-looking as him. She wasn't strikingly beautiful but had rich brown hair that went down to her waist and cute freckles under her eyes. Her hair was in one long braid down her back and her neck was completely hidden in a furry green scarf.

"Hey!" Sirius said, noticing her, and outstretched his hand for her to shake. She did unsurely, as if suspecting with good reason that he wasn't being sincere. "I don't think we've ever been introduced. I'm Sirius. But you can call me Snuffles."

Peter and James giggled quietly, trying to contain themselves. Madelin looked a little uncomfortable, as if feeling made fun of.

"Guys, cut it out," Remus said with the same tiredness still in his voice.

"Okay, sorry," Sirius said to her. "I know I can seem like a prat, but I'm really nice and...cuddly, really..."

James and Peter couldn't help but start laughing again, looking like they wanted to hit Sirius for causing them to. They didn't get the chance to before a musical voice behind them said, "Hi, guys."

Lily had a duffel bag over her shoulder and a small suitcase. As the group made room for her to stand in the circle with everyone, a head poked out of her unzipped bag. It belonged to a cat with long white fur and powdery blue eyes.

"Well, hello, Galadriel," James said, reaching out to pet her cat which he seldom encountered. "How are you?"

"She's miserable," Lily said. "She hates sitting in here...No, Gal, you can't get out yet," she said as the cat struggled to crawl out for what obviously wasn't the first time. "Just take a nap or something."

At that moment a Ravenclaw girl named Johanna Silversmith walked by and said with a flirtatious voice, "Hi, Sirius."

"Hey, Johanna," he said back with a wave to her and a wink, immediately sinking to the same level of shallow talk.

"Er...Padfoot?" Remus asked once she was gone. "I thought you were with Victoria Knightley last time I checked."

"Yeah, so?"

Remus, along with a couple others present, rolled his eyes.

"Oh, by the way, thanks for your Christmas present," Sirius said. "You've officially revealed the wrongs of my dating behavior to my cousin."

"I'm disappointed," he said. "I hoped it would reveal the wrongs of your dating behavior to _you_."

Almost everyone laughed, even though not all of them understood what they were talking about.

"Oh, Madelin. Hi," Lily said, noticing her for the first time and sounding pleasantly surprised to see her with them. "Are you going to sit with us on the train?"

"Uh, have you counted how many people are here?" Sirius interfered. "Maybe I'm just mistaken, but there's six of - Ow! Dammit!" he yelled as James stomped on his foot.

"Actually, a few of my friends are already saving me a seat," Madelin said politely. "In fact, I better go join them. See you later," she said, directing her last comment at Remus in particular.

"We better go, too," Remus said to everyone, picking up his suitcase.

"Yeah," Sirius agreed. "We've got to hurry before all the compartments are taken."

Sirius, Remus, and Peter had rushed away toward the train before James and Lily could pick up all of their things. Since they now knew the others would save seats for them, they didn't need to be in any hurry.

James picked up his suitcase and Lily held hers with the arm that her duffel bag was over so that she had one free hand. After they rose from bending over to pick up their things, their eyes met and stayed locked that way, as unmovable as doors facing each other at opposite ends of a room.

"Hi," she said finally. "...How was your Christmas?"

"It was good," he answered. For all of the dull details didn't matter now that he was looking at her again. "What about yours?"

She nodded. "Fine." There was a brief pause of silence, and then she said, "I missed you."

He smiled. In a slow and undetectable movement their hands met in the space between them and clasped. They walked off like this toward the train, in a very quiet and unseen way.

In the compartment that they claimed, Sirius took a window seat next to Lily and James, and Peter and Remus sat facing them on the other side. Sirius had hardly sat down before he was looking through the records Mr. Potter had given him as eagerly as a kid digging into his bag of Halloween candy after trick-or-treating. Lily, mildly interested since she recognized most of the bands, looked briefly at each one after Sirius did as a stack accumulated on the seat in between the two of them. After the train had been moving for twenty minutes, Sirius was impatient to get something to eat and stood up to go hunt down the candy cart. He was barely out the door when a Gryffindor girl with long, very straight blond hair and a curvy body shape was standing before him. It was Victoria Knightley.

"Sirius, you didn't say hi to me outside the train," she said.

Sirius made a smooth transition from being surprised to being his nice self he always was around pretty females. "Well Vic, if you were close by, I didn't see you," he said in a kind of glazed, fake voice that one uses when babying a pet or a child.

Lily crossed her arms and shook her head as everyone inside the compartment heard their conversation. The others laughed quietly.

"I was hoping you missed me a little over the holidays," Victoria said with a pout.

"Sure I missed you, babydoll," Sirius said off-handedly, obviously without even thinking about whether it was true. "Hey, what do you say I buy you a chocolate frog?"

"Aw, will you really?"

Continuing to talk in this way, they walked off down the train and out of earshot of everyone in the compartment.

"I give up," Remus said, who now had his face in a newspaper. "The day Sirius gets in a mature relationship, I think we're all doomed."

They laughed.

Peter and Remus got into a conversation about one of the articles in the paper. James wasted little time while Sirius was away before turning to Lily, who was currently looking at the songs on the back of a Simon and Garfunkel album. "Oh, I should tell you. You might not want to ask Sirius anything about how his holiday went."

Remus looked up. "What?"

"Things went really bad at the big family reunion. I can't explain it all now. But he actually got fed up and left them this time."

"You mean he ran away?" Lily asked with raising concern.

"Basically, yes. He stayed at my house the rest of the time. He's not in the brightest mood right now."

"No kidding," Peter said. "And I actually thought he was feeling pretty good today."

"Probably because he's trying too hard to hide it," Remus said.

When Sirius returned, he had a handful of goodies and looked as exhausted as someone might look after walking a dog that pulled them along at a run the whole time.

"Padfoot, don't you ever fear that your karma is going to get back around to you one of these days and bite you back when you least expect it?" James asked out of genuine curiosity as he helped himself to one of his Cauldron Cakes.

"What?" Sirius asked cluelessly. "I bought her chocolate, what else do you want me to do?"

Lily sighed. He stood with his arms open questioningly, obviously expecting an actual answer, but they all knew he was beyond help.

A while later, Sirius had just sat down when a few Slytherin students passed their compartment. Nobody looked up or acknowledged it in any uncasual way until someone at the back of the group stopped abruptly at the sight of them. Severus Snapes stick-figure shape and slumped posture gave him away at once; they all saw him out of the corners of their eyes and noticed. It was clear that he had not purposely walked by them and not even really meant to stop, but had just been alarmed. He and the group sitting in the compartment avoided each other with such determination that a chance encounter like this brought an unpleasant surprise.

The five stared up at him for a moment in silence, but interlaced in the silence was a simmering dislike, and even among some of them, a noiselessy boiling hatred. It was only Lily whose emotions seemed cool, and when she was the one to speak there was even a trace of regret and sadness in her voice.

"Hello, Severus."

It was very different than it used to be, like it would have been less than a year ago, even though the words were no different than what she would have said then. Lily's greeting seemed to wake up Snape in a way so that he realized at last that he was standing there, and almost immediately he looked forward again and kept walking.

Sirius was now the only one who wasn't looking at the empty space where Snape had stood seconds ago. Lily turned to him and there was suddenly a hole that had to be filled by saying something, but she hadn't said anything to fill it ever since the hole had been made last spring when he did the thing that nobody would talk about now.

Quietly and gently, Lily began, "Sirius..."

"Don't, Lily," he said. "I know what you're going to say anyway. I don't need you to scold me like-"

"No, Sirius, listen," she said, still quietly even though he had already broken any kind of calmness present. "Now, of course I think that was a horrible thing for you to do, and he didn't deserve it. But I could never bring myself to actually say that to you. I have no right to blame you like that when I haven't had to live with those kinds of people my entire life."

Sirius was looking down so that no one saw his expression clearly, but there was still somehow a perceptible change in him when she said that.

"I mean...have you thought about why you would do something like that?" Lily asked him.

James was looking forward and couldn't see Sirius, but from the kind of silence he was giving he knew that they should all stop staring at him now and leave him alone. He reached to the side and touched Lily's arm so that she turned away, and as soon as she looked at James she got the message. Then Peter and Remus did, too. It took a while for them to start talking normally again, and for a few minutes they just looked at the moving land outside the window, but eventually they forgot all about Snape standing there and it was as if it had never bothered them at all.


	4. Hello, I Love You

There was something very rushed, hectic, and unrelaxing about the days back in school. During the late winter there were no Quidditch games or lunch hours spent outside in the sun to look forward to, only studying and work. And from the very first day they came back, Remus's calm and peaceful piano playing that the boys and Lily were used to hearing in the common room most of the time was suddenly replaced with loud guitar and rock organ exploding from Sirius's record player. Lily at first had the instinct to tell Sirius this wasn't very nice and that he shouldn't be stealing the common room from Remus, but in the end she figured it could only be good for him to get out from behind his big grand piano every once in a while and be part of the action.

Which was usually Sirius standing on the coffee table moving wildly and singing along to the Doors "Back Door Man" (though he liked to change the lyrics to say "black dog man") or doing something of the sort that probably only Sirius could get away with without being pelted with books by the rest of the Gryffindors who were trying to study.

"I can't believe I'm actually getting used to this," Lily remarked to James one night as they were studying spells in the common room and Sirius put on a Jethro Tull record.

James laughed. "Well, we'd be stupid to complain. Hardly any magic school students get to have any kind of exposure to music. Well, recordings of music, at least."

"Yeah, that's true," she said. "But it's just...not exactly the most conventional environment for doing homework."

Sirius had started listening to their conversation, and said, "What are you talking about? This is relaxing. Right, Moony?"

Remus obviously had no comment. He simply smiled in his characteristic way, barely lifting the corners of his mouth so that his faced changed only a little, and looked back down at his books.

"You people are no fun, honestly," Sirius sighed.

"We're back at school now," Lily reminded. "We're not supposed to be having fun."

"Ah, Lily," Sirius said in a sort of sympathetic way. "In the name of Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and the Holy Ghost, I will pray for your soul."

"Shut up and do your homework, Padfoot," James said.

"I'm done with it, Prongs," Sirius shot back in a sarcastically fluffy voice.

"Dang it," Peter said, who was looking very stressed with a lot of Potions notes arranged haphazardlyaround him. "He's always the one who gets to say that, and yet I never actually see him working."

Sirius, realizing that there was nothing to do in the common room but be surrounded by people studying when he wasn't, went out the portrait hole and decided to go to the Great Hall and see if there was anyone more amusing to talk to. When he got there, there were about a dozen people at each table. At this time of night students usually paid no attention to what table they sat at since kids from different houses would join each other anyway, and some were changed out of their uniforms into more casual clothes. Sirius spotted William Bell, the Gryffindor Quidditch captain who he and James liked to talk to, sitting in a small group and started to walk over to him.

On the way there, however, he was suddenly distracted by a girl sitting at the Ravenclaw table on his left. What caught his eye was that she was leaning forward with her elbows on the table as she read a book so that her shirt came up in the back and showed a considerable strip of pale skin above where her dark gray skirt began. In an obviously unintended way this drew attention to itself, but that was not the reason he stopped; the light skin contrasting with her dark clothes just made him suddenly notice the rest of her as well. The girl was all thin limbs and smooth skin, and her black hair which shined like wet ink was cut off evenly a couple inches past her jaw, just short enough for her confidently upright neck to be visible from every angle. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows to show her white arms, and the pleated skirt was sloppily bunched up over her crossed knees, which were a little bony and looked like theyd never been scraped on rough concrete her whole life.

Before Sirius knew what he was doing, he had sat down right next to her at the table and was now looking at her from a level and close-up perspective. She looked up at him and the expression of confusion came as expected at the moment she concluded that she didn't know him. Her face was just as regardable as the rest of her, he saw. She had those glassy kind of eyes that should be staring across a smoky room with dim lights and a wonderfully pouty mouth.

"Er...Hi," he managed to say before too many seconds of silence had gone by for this encounter to be saved from complete awkwardness. "So...How was your Christmas?"

She cracked a smile and even giggled a little. "Um. My parents are Jewish."

"My parents are servants of the devil, and that didn't stop them."

Then she laughed for real. She had a very throaty, textured laugh.

"Okay, then," Sirius said. "Laughing. We're getting somewhere. So, what are you then?"

"Huh?"

"Well, you said, 'My parents are Jewish.' That kind of sounds like you don't follow the same road."

"No, you couldn't say I do." She thought for a moment. "I guess you could call me an Agnostic transcendentalist with some Daoist principles."

Sirius's eyes widened as if he had just been explained a very complicated math equation in three seconds. "Transcendentawhat?"

She laughed. "Never mind."

He eyed her as if trying to figure something out. "Are you one of those hippie people? Like...the Muggles that go around hitting tambourines and meditating?"

"Though I must admit that sounds like a lot of fun, the war ended a long time ago," she said.

Sirius could only partially understand what she meant from the things James had tried to explain to him about the "hippie movement" that was very slowly and belatedly moving into the knowledge of the magic community.

Sirius paused a moment, and then with a snapping realization put his hand forward. "Oh. I'm Sirius Black."

She took his hand and shook it. "Sophia Stabbard."

"Sophia," he repeated. He stared at her as if either burning it into his memory or just enjoying the sound of the name as he said again, "Sophia..."

She smiled. The smile was clean, mischievous, and vampire-like, and her teeth were as white as her skin.

"What house are you from?" she asked. "Gryffindor?"

"Roar," he said in answer.

"That's what I thought."

"How'd you know?" he asked.

"Oh," she said mysteriously, "I'm good at these things. I can tell lions from badgers all right," she added with a laugh.

Sirius leaned over and looked at the pages of her book. "_The Twelfth Night_," he read off of the top of the page. "What's that?"

"Come on," Sophia said. "Shakespeare."

He squinted his eyes a little as if racking his memory. "He's some Muggle, isn't he? A writer or something."

She smirked. "You're a Pureblood."

"Yeah," he said in an unfortunate tone. "It's not hard to tell, is it?"

"Well, any wizard who doesn't know who Will Shakespeare is can't have grown up exposed to much Muggle culture."

"I know who Mick Jagger is, though," he said, as if trying feebly to impress her.

She gasped and put her hand to her chest. "Well, thank goodness. I don't think I could have a conversation with someone who's not familiar with the Stones." He smirked and she shoved his shoulder teasingly. "I'm just kidding. Being a Pureblood is nothing to be ashamed of."

"Oh, believe me, it can be."

She seemed to frown a little. Then she closed her book and put it in her bag on the table. "Don't tell anyone I've been reading sappy Muggle poetry, though, alright?" she said as she stood up from her seat.

"Wait," he said as she started to leave. "Can I...er...see you sometime?"

She stopped walking away and stood there unmeaningfully. "We live at the same school. I'm sure it's a likely possibility."

"You know what I mean."

She shrugged. "Whatever. But I have to get going. It gets really cold down in the dungeons and I want to get a chair near the fireplace to finish a paper."

"What are you going down there for?" he asked.

"Well...that's where my common room is," she said obviously.

Sirius's look of confusion dropped to one of disbelief as the realization sunk in. "...You're a Slytherin?"

She didn't nod or give a positive answer. She just waited a moment and asked without smiling, "Not what you were expecting?"

He didn't reply. He just sat there staring at her, taking in what he'd just learned, and she knew he wasn't going to say anything more and walked away. Then he slowly turned forward and put his arms on the table, feeling like he had just been flying and then suddenly spit out from the sky back into the dirt on the ground.

Sirius didn't know any dramatic Shakespearian words of expression to give this situation justice, so he just stared down at the table unmeditatively and muttered, "Damn it."


	5. Twentieth Century Fox

The next morning Sirius, James, and Peter came into the Great Hall to find Lily and Remus already sitting at a table together, and at Remus's other side sat Madelin Wood. They were all reading mail that had just been delivered; Lily had a letter from her family, and Remus and Madelin were looking at a _Daily Prophet_ together.

"Hey, everyone," Sirius said before yawning.

The three looked up to acknowledge the new company and then lowered their eyes back down to reading. Peter noticed the date on the _Daily Prophet _and said, "Blimey, it's already the fifth? I hadn't even quite realized it was February yet."

"Yep," said Remus sighingly.

"The month of everyone's favorite holiday," Sirius said with lazy bitterness.

Lily laughed, and at first it seemed to be at his remark, but she was still looking at her letter. "Petunia tripped over our dog in the hallway and her braces scraped a long line of paint off the wall," she explained.

Everyone laughed.

"You're kidding!" James said. "That's hilarious."

"Who's Petunia?" asked Madelin.

"Her sister," Remus answered.

"Was she hurt?"

"Does anybody care?" said Sirius. When he and Lily had been getting to know each other a long time ago, they had found that just about the only thing they had in common was loathsome family members, so he had heard enough about Petunia to develop a distaste for her by now.

"No, she was okay," Lily answered, still laughing. "But I'm sure the wall looks kind of weird now."

The others continued to laugh, and Madelin started to smile in amusement.

Lily put her letter away in her bag and Remus and Madelin returned to the newspaper. As they read the news their faces became more grim than they had been moments before. Lily took a drink of juice, her eyes shifted to the side at the paper, and after she put the goblet back down and wiped her mouth she said to them, "Pretty scary, isn't it?"

It was obvious to everyone else without them seeing the text on the page that it was an article about the Death Eaters. When he and Madelin had both finished reading, Remus asked, "Does anybody want to see this?"

James outstretched his hand to receive the newspaper and spread it on the table in front of him so that Sirius and Peter could see it, too. Large print at the top of the page read, "Crouch Cracks Down on Death Eaters." The article said the following:

"Everyone by now is aware of what the Death Eaters do, what their intentions are, and why they are a serious danger to us. But the question that Ministry official Barty Crouch is focusing on right now is, Who are they?

"'Not many people are realizing that the Death Eaters are real people,' says Crouch. 'They are people from the inside of magic society that we know. Anyone that you see every day at your job could be one of them. It is my goal to reveal each and every once of them in plain sight. Instead of trying to catch them while they're hidden under their black robes operating together, we will do whatever it takes to get their names so that they will not be able to hide anymore.'

"Crouch has already begun his thorough search for the enemy, and in the past two weeks has arrested almost sixty witches and wizards suspected of working with the Death Eaters. Thirty-six of these have already been put on trial, and nine were judged as guilty. This makes the number of captured Death Eaters to be twenty-three. Crouch is offering less harsh sentences to the arrested found guilty who will give names of others they worked with, which he hopes will lead to the arrest of more guilty people and less innocent ones.

"Many are against Crouch's ways of fighting the problem, claiming that it is only giving them something else to fear. Will the constant accusation of others lead to distrust of and even prejudice against all Purebloods, whether they truly share the opinions of the Death Eaters or not? What about innocent people who just end up at the wrong place at the wrong time? Rosaline Whitacre, an assistant at a small office for Muggle secrecy management was accused and put on trial because she stayed home sick the day the office was destroyed by the Death Eaters. Whitacre was able to prove she had known nothing about the plans and was released, but she had to spend nearly a week in Azkaban which she is still recovering from.

"'This system is doing us more bad than good,' protests Gene Morley, a studier of potions development and father of three. 'You can't say the word "Death Eater" without somebody getting accused and arrested. It is nothing but a perfect way for people to get people they don't like locked in Azkaban by lying about them. There are children with their parents losing their jobs and getting taken away to prison because they've been wrongfully accused, and the other parents don't know what to tell them. And nobody even knows what they're doing with the people who have been found guilty; one of my kids was terrified because he'd heard a rumor about people being tortured to give names. This is not the way to solve the problem, and this is not the way to be protecting us.'

"Whenever presented with these kinds of responses to his methods, Crouch promises that no harm is going to be done to those who are innocent and there is nothing to fear. He says, 'A few days in Azkaban are a small price for a few people to pay for the guaranteed safety of the public.'"

James finished reading first and reached over the paper to take a piece of toast, not bothering to use a plate. "I don't know. Crouch seems like kind of a nut to me."

Lily and Remus both nodded their agreement.

"You know," Madelin began, "I've heard this rumor that Hogwarts is on the list of predictable targets for Death Eater attacks."

"That's true," Sirius confirmed immediately, as if there was no refuting it. "The Kincaids' dad is an Auror, and he's heard stuff at work that he actually told them not to spread around. They've been tightening the security around this place the whole year and we don't even know it. Obviously because Dumbledore doesn't want to scare the piss out of the whole student body."

"Alright, so they've been tightening security," Lily said. "That doesn't mean anything for sure."

"And Hogwarts is so big and secure," Peter said. "It just doesn't seem plausible that they could do any damage here. I thought that was the whole reason they've decided that all government facilities will be rebuilt as one large building with extremely protective charms on it, because places like this are so safe."

"You'd be surprised what crazy people will try," James said.

"And they're crazy," Sirius said. "Terrorists will do anything to make an impression. And if they really want to make an impression, hitting this place would be something. So many people in the wizarding world have kids that go here. The entire future of our society is in this castle. And there's other valuable stuff here that we don't even know about, without a doubt. Weapons, maybe. Who knows?"

Even though Madelin had brought up the subject, she seemed uncomfortable because of how everyone, especially Sirius, was making it into a casual debate. She stood up slowly, in a way without direction or cause quite yet. Remus looked up at her. "You going?"

"Yeah, I think I'll go find Selena at my table. I'll see you later," she said to him. And this time she looked at everyone else and added, "Bye, you guys."

They all waved or said some kind of goodbye as she left. Then there was a pregnant silence that followed, and Sirius whipped it right out of the air.

"So, what exactly is happening between you and Maggie?" he asked Remus.

There was a pause of confusion, and then Lily blinked in disbelief of him and corrected blankly, "Madelin."

"Right," he said, making no attempt to burn the name into his memory for future reference. "Anyway, are you...well...?"

Remus shrugged his bony shoulders, moving some waffle remnants around his plate with a fork. "We're just friends right now."

"Is 'right now' the key part of that statement in her book, too?" James asked.

"Er...I..."

"Yes, of course," Lily answered for him with an affectionately annoyed sigh. "She knows what's going on."

Sirius turned the pages of the _Daily Prophet_ until he found a more optimistic article and hid his face behind it, already detached from the conversation.

"The thing is, I don't know," Remus said with frustration in his voice that sounded too tired to be completely risen.

"Oh, have some more confidence," she said. "I've seen the two of you together enough to know."

"What's Madelin like?" James asked curiously.

"She's...really nice," Remus said, scratching his hair around the back of his head. "She talks a lot more when she's not with five people, you know. I'm still getting to know her, I guess. But it's really easy talking to her."

"Madelin's a smart girl," Sirius said suddenly, the paper still hiding any kind of expression on his face. "I had her in my third year Defense class."

Everyone turned their heads to him but he didn't say anything more, so Peter said, "There you go. She's smart. She sounds perfect for you."

Sirius slowly lowered the paper a little. "Remus, I don't..."

Everyone looked at him once again. The fact that he had used Remus's real name was such a surprise that when he didn't continue they had to know what it was he wasn't saying.

"What?" Remus asked.

He lowered the paper from him completely. "Moony, I don't think you should..." Sirius didn't want to say it, but something was nagging him until he did. "I don't think you should try getting into anything with Madelin."

It took the others a moment to realize what they'd just heard.

"What?" James asked confusedly.

"What are you talking about?" Peter asked. "You just got done saying that she's a smart girl."

"Madelin is a smart girl," he repeated unnecassarily. Then, "She'll figure it out."

There came a loud, overtaking silence full of anything but understanding.

"Figure what out?" Remus asked calmly, curiosity obviously taking over his other possible reactions.

But he was standing up to leave.

"Sirius!" Lily was appalled.

"Sirius, what the hell are you saying?" James demanded.

"Forget it," he said, and just like that he had already left.

James turned around to face the table again. "He was acting weird when we met Madelin outside the train, too."

"Just ignore him," Lily said. "He doesn't know anything. He's just being unneededly protective."

"I don't get it," Remus said. He was looking like he might if Sirius had just blatantly insulted him in a way he never had insulted a friend before, and obviously had no idea what to think at the moment. "Is he...in a bad mood and just...?"

"Yes," James said, for as a matter of fact he had noticed this morning that Sirius seemed to be in a bad mood. "But that's not why. He has a reason. He just doesn't want to come out with it for some reason."

There was a moment of unhappy contemplation, and then James said directly to Remus, "I'm not saying you should listen to him at all, of course. I mean, we all know how much Sirius knows about relationships."

Remus and Peter laughed half-heartedly. Lily bit her fingernails in thought, still not satisfied and very confused. James went back to eating and he and Lily met eyes briefly as they had developed a habit of doing often as a kind of certification that they were going to have to talk about something later together.

Remus just became quiet and continued to look troubled, his eyes drifting over toward the Hufflepuff table every once in a while.

* * *

Shortly before James and Sirius's Transfiguration class was to start later that day, they were walking down the school halls with three members of the Quidditch team: William Bell, his girlfriend Yvette Doisneau, and her brother Arnaud. James and Arnaud were in a dynamic conversation about the Scotland Sirens playing in the Quidditch World Cup last year, while Sirius was just being uncharacteristically quiet.

"No, no, no," Yvette had to cut in after listening to their conversation for a few minutes. "It wasn't that Killman didn't see the Snitch. He was bluffing; that's his trademark strategy. But it had just become too predictable by then. Stork caught onto it right away. It cost them the ten points they needed to win."

James looked to the side at Sirius as William started to correct her on the exact number of points the difference was. He and Sirius could read each other's minds so well there wasn't really a need to say anything, but he did decide to ask, simply, "What?"

Sirius just shook his head. "Nothing."

James shrugged. If Sirius didn't want to talk about what was bothering him, there was never any use prodding him about it. So he turned back to the others, but then Sirius grabbed his arm to make him look back. At first he didn't say anything, stopping to think first. And then he began, "You know this girl named Sophia Stabbard?"

James's shoulders sunk. "Oh, no," he sighed, already knowing where this was going.

"No, Prongs, it's not like that," he defended right away. "It's not another one of those."

"Another what?" William asked, having overheard.

"A girl," James said, which explained everything. Yvette laughed and William accepted it right away as something he didn't need to hear about.

"Anyway, I met her last night in the Hall," Sirius explained. "I swear I've never seen her before. I've never even heard the name Stabbard before. I mean, does anybody know her?"

"Wait a minute." William stopped. "Are you saying you've got something going with _Sophia Stabbard_?"

"At this point, I can only say if I'm lucky," Sirius said regretfully.

But William, from what he knew about Sirius's way with girls, seemed to take that as a "Yes." He made a kind of wincing sound and said, "Oh, _man_. I don't know about dating in the Slytherin territory, you know, but she is the hottest piece in the house."

"Will!" Yvette yelled.

"But of course I think you're the hottest piece in the whole school, baby," William fixed right away, laughing in a guilty you-caught-me way.

"Wait, wait," said James. "Did I just hear him right? She's a Slytherin?"

"Yeah," Sirius admitted slowly. "But I didn't know that until after I talked to her for ten minutes."

James rolled his eyes and hit his forehead with a book he was carrying, which luckily was not a very hefty one. "Could you get more shallow, Padfoot? How can you even care how hot she is knowing that? And you, of all people."

"No, you don't understand," Sirius begged. "This girl...she's not like the other Slytherins. She's not a snake. She is a _fox_, though," he added, unable to resist, with a kind of drooling expression glazing over his eyes.

"Good grief..."

"Sophia's a tough kitten," William commented. "I've heard she doesn't even have any friends. I wonder if you can handle her." Then, after a moment's thought, he added, "Actually, she's perfect for you, now that I think about it. She spends almost as much time in detention as you do."

"Yeah?" Sirius asked. "For what?"

"Skipping classes, mostly."

"How do you know all this?" Arnaud asked.

"Monty Clubber forges excuse notes for her every once in a while for a few Sickles. I hear all about how weird she is from him."

"Will, we've got to get going," Yvette said, looking at her watch. She, William, and Arnaud had the next class together two floors up from the one they were on.

"See you guys later," William said to James and Sirius, and the two groups went in opposite directions.

Sirius looked like he was violently contemplating two sides of an argument in his brain. "Do you really think it's a bad idea?" he asked James.

He shrugged. "It's your choice, Padfoot. I'm not the one who has met her. It just really surprises me that you of anyone would think twice about it."

"Yeah, I know." For Sirius didn't really know why she was still on his mind. After he had learned what house she was in, it should have been easier to dismiss her as not being worth getting to know. But somehow, it wasn't that simple. The easiness of that first conversation with her, the elation of the newness of meeting her that had dominated the entire encounter until she told him what house she was from, was still fresh in his memory and wouldn't leave him alone.

After sitting through Professor McGonagall's entire lesson without hearing a single word of it, he had reached his decision.

* * *

"It's your turn," Madelin said.

She and Remus were walking down the icy cobblestone streets of Hogsmeade on the way to a bakery, playing a game they had started doing often to get to know each other in which they took turns asking each other random questions. They were now so comfortable with each other that the game usually ended up making a transition into easily flowing conversation after a few minutes.

"Alright..." Remus thought, his gloved hands cozily resting in the pockets of his coat. "If you could change into any animal, what would it be?"

"Hmm...I think a dolphin," she decided. "That would be fun."

"But you couldn't do it just anywhere. You'd have to be in the water."

"So?"

"Alright, a dolphin then. Your turn."

Madelin looked around in thought as snowflakes flurried into her dark hair. "Why do your friends call you Moony?"

"They do that around you?" he asked, caught by surprise.

"Yeah, I've heard Sirius call you that a couple times."

"Well..." Remus tried to think of a way not to lie to her. "I had this really weird thing when I was little that I was terrified of the moon." He thought of a way to extend the story creatively and abandoned all hope of being partially truthful. "I couldn't look at it without seeing this really creepy face in it. It's the kind of thing I could never point out; you just have to notice it yourself."

Madelin giggled. "Can you still see the same face in it now?"

"Nah. I think my imagination made it scarier then it really was then. But of course, I told this to my friends one day and they never stopped teasing me about it. When we all started making up nicknames for each other, Moony just seemed obvious."

"Why all the other nicknames?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Just things that came about. Sirius just acts like a dog, for one thing, so we've always call him dog-related things." He remembered something true he could tell her and added, "He's always wanted a really nasty-looking guard dog named Snuffles and he wanted us to call him that for a time, but one day Padfoot came up and it just stuck."

Madelin nodded. "I see."

There was a comfortable pause in the conversation that was filled with the talking of the people around them and the noises of the town. Then Remus remembered it was his turn and said, "Okay...What are you scared of more than anything?"

She opened her mouth to answer, but then someone called, "Madelin!"

Madelin's friend, Selena Sterling, had almost completely passed by her and Remus without noticing them. She was with two other friends and they were all carrying shopping bags most likely full of items bought from Christmas money.

"Hi, Selena," Madelin said.

"Where are you guys going?" she asked. "We're going to the Three Broomsticks now, we're exhausted. You should come with us."

Madelin showed some hesitation to agree and then slipped her arm through Remus's. "Oh...that's all right. Remus and I are kind of on a date, you see."

"Ah, I get it," Selena said, not at all offended and casting Remus a smile and wink. "Well, I'll see you back at the school then."

As the three girls walked away, Remus looked down at Madelin and she smiled at him very casually, as if nothing had just been established. But to him, what she had just said had made all the difference in the world.

* * *

Sirius and James were some of the only people who were on the school grounds after class. A great number of students, including Remus, Lily, and Peter, had gone shopping in Hogsmeade, and most of the others were inside keeping warm by fireplaces. But there were a few small groups outside in the snow, the largest being nine Hufflepuffs who were engaged in an epic snowball fight and a group of popular Slytherins including Bellatrix Black and Lucius Malfoy.

Noriko Takanashi, a Fifth Year girl who was one of Lily's friends, came up to them and said, "James? Do you know anything about guns?"

"Guns?" he echoed oddly. "Why?"

"I have to interview another student for an essay in Muggle Studies, and weapons are my topic. I thought you might be good to ask since one of your parents is a Halfblood."

"No, I don't really know anything about that. Have you asked Lily?"

"Prongs!" Sirius interrupted, pulling James's sleeve.

"I didn't want to ask Lily because I think someone else is interviewing her already," Noriko answered.

"Oh," James said. "Well, you might want to pick another topic. I don't think I would necessarily know much about weapons even if I was Muggle-born."

"Prongs!" Sirius said again, pulling his arm more obnoxiously.

"What!" he asked, turning.

Sirius was looking in the direction of all of the Slytherins. "That's her."

He pointed and James's eyes followed his finger to where Sophia Stabbard was standing off to the side of a lesser crowd of Slytherin students who were in a circle smoking cigarettes, looking off into the distance with her arms crossed. Her long coat was hanging open unbuttoned and today Sirius could see she wore her full uniform, silver and green house colors included, which for some reason made kind of a surreal sight.

James squinted his eyes, getting a good look at her. "Cute," he agreed. "I definitely don't remember ever seeing her before."

"Yeah," Sirius said, not seeming to be listening as he stared at her. "You'll have to excuse me, Prongs."

"You're gonna talk to her again?" James asked in surprise. "Now?"

"Yes, I am."

Sophia was looking down at the ground tracing figures in the snow with her feet as she eavesdropped on other people's conversations, smirking to herself every once in a while when she heard something funny or just ridiculously stupid. She reacted quite calmly when Sirius appeared right next to her.

"So," he said, holding the compass Remus had given him for Christmas in his hand, "a few minutes ago I randomly decided to just follow this compass wherever it leads me, and I ended up over here."

"Shh," she said, still listening to a story Bellatrix was telling Malfoy about seven strides away. "She's talking about you."

"It doesn't surprise me," Sirius said flatly.

"Come on," she said suddenly, grabbing his hand and pulling him in the direction of a tree that Bellatrix's group was near. They went behind the tree at a run and hid there, though Sirius certainly didn't know why.

Sophia peaked out and looked at Bellatrix. "I detest her," she explained to Sirius. "I swear no words have ever come out of her mouth that weren't completely unattractive."

"Yeah? So we do have something in common."

"Make a big snowball," she told him as she pulled her wand out of her robes.

He obeyed, as he had gloves on and she didn't, and then she pointed her wand at the packed round ball. "_Wingardium leviosa_."

It floated into the air and Sophia pointed her wand away from them, directing the ball over toward Bellatrix.

"Oh, you are not!" Sirius whispered sharply, exploding with excitement as the ball hovered unnoticed over Bellatrix's head.

"Oops," Sophia said sarcastically, dropping her wand into the snow. The snowball immediately fell onto Bellatrix's head and caked a thick layer of white on her hair.

"Ugh! What the bloody hell!" they heard her yell as they went into rolling fits of laughter. She heard them and spotted them behind the tree. "You! You filthy little-!"

Sophia grabbed her wand from the ground and the two of them got up, Sirius taking her arm and pulling her into a run as they continued to laugh so much their stomachs seemed to painfully shrivel up. Once they were a decent distance away from the unpleasant group, they stopped and calmed down.

"That was good," Sirius said.

"I've been wanting to embarrass her in front of her friends for forever," she said.

"And in front of Malfoy! The stuffiest guy in the house; I think he had to try really hard to keep looking like he had a pole shoved four feet up his arse right then!"

Once their laughing calmed to a stop, there was a stretch of strange silence that one would expect to happen in a second encounter between two people more than the explosive laughter from a moment before. Then Sirius decided to just ask her what he wanted to know.

"Why did you talk to me even though I told you I'm from Gryffindor?" he asked.

"I knew what house you were from before you told me," she explained. "You're Bella's and Narcissa's cousin. They never shut up about how much they hate you, I would have to be deaf not to know who you are by now."

"How come I've never seen you around before?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Maybe because I'm a Sixth Year. Maybe because you avoid paying attention to people wearing green at all costs. Or maybe I'm just not that noticeable."

"That last possibility is definitely not it." For a moment, Sirius just looked at her as if very confused. "I don't get it. You don't act like a Slytherin. I sure didn't get the impression you're 'pure.'"

"No, I'm not really. I'm about an eighth Muggle. My family's composed of Muggles who know about the magic community and have witches and wizards marry into the family a lot. I have Gryffindors, Slytherins, Ravenclaws, and Hufflepuffs in my family in equal amounts, not to mention nasty people and nice people both. Everyone I know just sort of assumes that I'm on their side, because my heritage is way too diverse for you to tell anything just from that."

"Whose side are you on, then?" he asked.

"Not your cousins'," she answered easily. She looked at the group of smokers. "Maybe theirs. Maybe yours. Why does it matter?"

"Er...I don't know. I guess I just..." He gave up hopelessly. "Do you want to do something with me in Hogsmeade tomorrow or not?"

She didn't think about it very long before saying, "Okay."

"Really?" he responded brightly.

"Yeah. Well. I kind of told myself that if you ever talked to me again even after finding out what house I'm in, I would give you a try."

Sirius took that in for a moment and then could think of nothing else to do but smile at her. She smiled back, but a little laughingly, and then she looked down at his compass, which he had started to fool with in his hands a little while talking to her.

"What is that thing, anyway?" she asked.

He looked down at it and then said quickly, "Nothing," hiding it behind his back.

"What is it?" she asked again, reaching behind him only to have him keep pulling away. "Was it really pointing at me? Let me see!"

In the distance, James and Noriko saw Sirius play around with her like this for a few more seconds before she ended up just chasing him around in the snow laughing.

"Looks like it went well," Noriko said, who only had a small idea of what was going on.

James, who actually had a quite surprised look on his face, nodded. "...Yeah."


	6. Something In The Air

A week later James, Peter, Sirius, and Lily were at the Gryffindor table eating breakfast. The morning had been quite calm and undisturbing so far, but the air around the four of them became a little quiet and tense when Remus didn't appear for a while.

Lily leaned over to James and whispered, "He got back all right, didn't he?"

"Of course," he said. "He went up to his bed right away and was kind of resting on and off the rest of the night...before the rest of us went to sleep, anyway. He's probably just still tired."

There had been a full moon the night before last, and Remus had changed back from a werewolf the evening before.

"Madelin, you know...She was asking questions," Lily explained. "She and Remus haven't been friends for more than a month, but she has enough classes with him to have noticed him being gone a lot before..."

James nodded, understanding. "Nice to see she's concerned about him, at least."

Lily nodded. It was immediately after that that Remus approached the table at a tired pace and said quietly, "Hello."

James picked up some of his books from the spot next to him so that Remus could sit down.

"Morning, Moony," Peter said cheerfully.

"Alright?" James asked him.

Remus nodded, his eyelids looking so heavy they seemed to shield his entire eyes so that it seemed a wonder that he could see.

It wasn't a very long time at all before Madelin came up to their table and said, "Remus, you're back."

"Hey, Madelin," he said as she sat down sideways on the seat next to him so that she was facing him. When he smiled at her, she didn't smile back.

"Remus, you look terrible," she said with worry.

"I'm fine," he promised. "I'm just a little tired."

"No, are you sure you aren't still sick?" she asked, turning his face toward her and putting her hand to his forehead. "I don't think you should go back to classes today, I think you should go see Madam Trice."

"She already gave me potion to make me better," he told her. "And I am, I just don't look it. This happens a lot."

"It's true," James backed him up, talking with a light tone. "For some reason Remus always looks like he's just been beat up. Getting over being sick just isn't helping, I guess."

"I don't think it's funny," she said seriously.

Everyone went silent for a moment, not knowing what to say.

"Madelin," Lily said kindly, "I don't think Remus looks any different. Maybe you're just being more concerned and observant with him than usual because he's been sick."

Sirius had been digging around in his bag for a few seconds and he took out a book to quickly hide his face behind, obviously a little less than enthusiastic about listening to this.

Peter looked to the side at him and asked, "What's that?" possibly just as a way to change the subject. Remus made a mental note to thank him later.

"It's a book," Sirius answered obviously without looking up. "Well...a play, actually."

The others turned their attention to it now. The cover read the title, _The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail_.

"Since when do you read?" Peter asked. After thinking about it for a second and receiving an insulted look from Sirius, he corrected, "Well, since when do you read at _breakfast?_ I've never actually seen you with a book. You always read and study in private; that's why no one understands how it is you earn perfect grades."

"It's Sophie's," Sirius explained. "She's educating me about transcendentalism."

James laughed automatically. "Geez, Padfoot, did you intend to go straight for the exact opposite of the kind of girl you're usually attracted to?"

"Oh, it's that Slytherin girl you like now?" Lily asked Sirius, catching what they were talking about. James had only briefly explained to her the important points of Sirius's new dating mission. "What's her name again?"

"Sophia," he answered. "Sophia Stabbard."

"Oh..." Lily's eyebrows drew together curiously and she looked down at the table, some kind of change seeming to happen in her after she heard the name. "I know who she is."

"Really?" James asked. "How?"

"Oh, you know...I've just see her around."

There was something very hiding and awkward about her voice as she said it, which only James seemed to notice. As Remus started to ask Sirius what Sophia looked like, he turned to her and asked, "What is it?"

"Huh?" she said, caught off guard. "Oh, nothing. Nothing."

Sirius ended up telling everyone his entire story from the beginning of how he had met Sophia, and the way he told it more than the story itself had everyone laughing, including Madelin. She seemed to have given up on mothering Remus and accepted that he was well enough to be back in school, and after a while they were talking to eachother easily and laughing, occasionally forking food from their plates into each other's mouths in the very casual and innocent way they always displayed affection that made it completely bearable for other people to have to watch them with eachother.

Except for Sirius, apparently, who would glance at them every once in a while and look like he wished he still had his book out to use as an excuse not to look at them.

While everyone else was still in the middle of eating, Sirius stood up and said, "I'll see the lot of you later. I've got other business to attend to."

"Huh?" asked Peter.

"That means he just saw Sophia walk in," James translated.

"Ah," he said, and then they all laughed.

* * *

Sirius and Sophia met at the doors to the library after dinner as they had for the past three days. They had both had enough of Hogsmeade shopping and dining to satisfy them for the rest of the month, so today they spent on the grounds seeing if they could make a snowman as tall as Hagrid the gamekeeper and inside at various locations of the castle just talking. Even though Sirius was an easily bored person, he found everything about what they did together tremendously entertaining, even if they were simply sitting on stairs talking about how neither of them had ever been able to get into sports enough to try out for the Quidditch teams (though one of the only times players like Avery had ever wanted to talk to Sophia, she told him, was when he and the rest of the team were begging her to play after seeing her chuck a book at a student who was making her mad while twenty feet above him on her broomstick, actually causing him to be rushed to Madam Trice for medical attention).

Before they had even thought about getting to bed, it was already 9:50. They walked down a hall toward the stairs going down to the dungeons that none of the students used very much because the Slytherin dormitories were on the opposite end of the castle right next to a different set of stairs.

"Come on, just sneak me down with you," Sirius was trying to convince her. "I will be the only Gryffindor student who's ever seen the Slytherin common room - do you know how intriguing that is? Everyone thinks you guys have got torturing devices down there or something."

She laughed. They were hardly moving at all, not thinking seriously enough about going to bed to be getting there very fast. "You would get caught right away. Do you think there's any kids from my house who don't know who you are? You'd get beat up by at least ten guys at the same time before you'd seen anything long enough to remember it."

They had reached the top of the stairs now and stopped walking.

"It's settled, then," he said jokingly. "If I can't come with you, I just won't let you leave."

She laughed again and then started for the stairs, waving and saying, "I'll see you tomorrow."

But he grabbed her by the arm with a humorous grin. "I'm serious, you're not going anywhere."

"Yeah, I know you're Sirius," she said, failing to keep from giggling as she said it.

"Oh God, that gets so old after having to live with my name for seventeen years," he sighed heavily. "Now I'm definitely not going to be sympathetic; I cannot let you go, that's it."

"Sirius!" she said, trying to pull away and laughing at the same time. "We have to be in bed in less than ten minutes."

"As if they actually check every night."

"Constantine does!"

"Well, he and McGonnagal need to have a meeting about the ways to exercise Head of House authority without succumbing to dullmonotony."

She looked at him determinedly and said, "You're going to let go of me."

He only brought her closer and held his hands tightly together behind her waist. She said, "Sirius!" and pushed on his shoulders, but he kept holding her around the waist so that she was stuck with him.

"I'll make you let go," she said with a devious smile.

"Is that so?" he said.

She kept trying to push herself away, but as she did he just kept pulling her closer to him so that their eyes were looking closer and closer into each other's challengingly. Then after a few seconds of this she looked up at him with that smile again, leaned forward quickly and kissed him.

He had not expected this. But it was only a second before he fell into it, his entire body relaxing and his hands moving up her back. He had hardly recovered from the surprise and started to slip into the moment when she broke away and moved her face to whisper in his ear. "You let go of me."

Before he could realize what that meant, she whirled around and darted away from him, slipping right out of his relaxed arms.

"Hey!" he called as she skipped down the stairs. "That's not fair!"

She just waved back at him right before descending out of his sight, and he could hear her laughing echoing down the cold dungeon halls.


	7. Love Is All Around

On the morning of Valentine's Day, all of the Gryffindor students woke up to a song being played loudly on Sirius's turntable in the common room. For some reason Sirius had gotten up a little early and apparently felt a great deal less bitter about what day it was than many others are known to be; at least enough to feel like playing "Love Is All Around" by the Troggs loud enough to wake everyone up. James was reminded of Sirius's first morning at his house during the holidays, though this time the music was preferably calmer to wake up to than Jimi Hendrix, and it even made James start to feel a little happy about it being Valentine's Day as he got dressed.

James went into the Great Hall for breakfast quite early and discovered that only one of his friends was already there at the section of the Gryffindor table where they usually sat. Lily looked very beautiful that morning, sitting up straight and looking through a chapter of Potions as she politely waited for others to get there before she ate. Today she had part of her hair tied back in a green velveteen ribbon that matched her eyes perfectly. As James approached her from her left he suddenly felt a surge of excitement for the time he had to steal to talk to her alone.

"Good morning," he said as he sat down next to her, adorning the greeting with a kiss on her forehead as she turned to him. "You look pretty."

"Thank you," she said, smiling warmly. "Happy Valentine's Day."

James smiled guiltily and then said, "I have a confession to make."

"What?"

"I didn't get you anything."

"Oh," she said with a careless wave of her hand. "It doesn't matter. I didn't get you anything either."

"Well, traditionally I don't think you're necessarily expected to as much as the guy..."

"Oh, come on. Don't be old-fashioned."

"Fine, no gifts or anything like that. But let's do something really nice tonight."

"Like what?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said consideringly. "Go somewhere we've never gone together before."

"With you gentlemen and that map of yours, that shouldn't be difficult."

"Shhh," he said, putting his finger to her lips. "You don't talk about that in public."

"As if you guys take very drastic measures for security, calling each other those silly nicknames," she laughed as she pushed his hand away.

"We can use our nicknames and _whisper_ about it in public because we're Marauders. You can't talk about it at all, cause you're not one."

"I'm as good as, now that I know everything!"

"Nah, I really don't think we could accept you as one of us," he said just to get on her nerves. "It's more like a men's club anyway. When we're not sneaking around the school we drink beer and watch dirty movies."

She laughed, nudging him with her elbow just as Sirius and Peter appeared and sat down.

"Oh no!" Lily suddenly interrupted Sirius, who had opened his mouth to say hello. "I completely forgot, I'm supposed to be eating with Noriko so I can talk to her about something. I'll see you guys later."

Just like that she had left, and as Sirius forked sausages onto a plate he said, "And what are everyone's plans for this unforgivably fluffy holiday?" Even as he made the negative statement, he was smiling and his tone was light and cheerful.

James shrugged. "I don't know. Probably hanging out in the Room of Requirement with Lily or something."

"Oh, I don't think so, Jim," Sirius said right away. "I'm taking Sophia to the Room of Requirement."

"Oh. Whatever. We can find somewhere else to go."

"Er...Is that exactly fair?" Peter questioned. "With how many times Sirius has used that room for dates, and the one time you want it..."

"No, I really don't care," James assured. "Something about using that room just doesn't seem...I don't know...classy, to me."

"Well, it's a hell of a lot more creative than going to the Three Broomsticks for the hundredth time, Prongs," Sirius said, almost sounding offended.

"No need to get touchy," James laughed. "That just isn't my style. Besides, something gives me the feeling Lily and Sophia wouldn't exactly be impressed by the same things."

Peter and Sirius laughed as Remus came up and sat down with them. The first thing he said was, "I'm going to smash your turntable, Padfoot."

The others laughed some more.

* * *

The first class of the day that all four of the boys had together was Divination. They had all decided to take it their last year to ensure that they had a class together that they could be lazy in. In fact, it had become one of the most enjoyable hours of school for them because the teacher, Professor Fangora, was very easy-going and didn't take the subject too seriously.

"Good afternoon, class," she greeted the room at the beginning of the hour. "Well, today we were supposed to review for your test on tarot readings tomorrow, but fortunately for you, in order to do that test I need the book I record your marks in which I left at my husband's house this weekend because I'm a dingbat."

There was an eruption of instant applause from the class, who had been expecting a very boring study hour today.

"And since it's Valentine's Day," Professor Fangora continued, "and since you're all still recovering from the holidays and don't want to think too much anyway, I thought we'd do something a little fun. So I talked to Professor Phlox and he gave me some of these from the greenhouse."

She held up two flower pots full of pansies, one with purple ones and the other with yellow ones.

"Pansies?" said Monty Clubber, who was sitting close enough to identify the flowers. "We have normal stuff like that in our greenhouse?"

"Actually, Mr. Clubber, pansies are used quite often for magic, but especially most magic involving romance," she explained. "Pansy pollen is one of the most important ingredients in making love potions. Obviously I can't teach you how to make a love potion because not only does it have nothing to do with Divination but it's also illegal."

The class laughed.

"However, there is something kind of fun that we can do with pansies today that I thought would be appropriate for this holiday. We are going to use them to reveal our future love lives."

There was a mixture of various reactions from the class, including Arnaud Doisneau asking, "Is she serious?"

Laughing, Professor Fangora waved her arms to quiet the class. "Don't take this that seriously. It's completely unprecise and unproven magic, not to mention not a kind of fortune telling that's commonly used for people your age. Anyway, to do this you will want to take two petals - from the purple pansies if there is already a specific love interest in your life and from the yellow pansies if there's no one yet - and a couple of leaves from a weeping tree that are on this table. Get a bowl and grinder from the cabinet and crush the petals and leaves in it in a circular motion, adding a small hair from your head into the mixture as you do so, until you have revolved the contents of your bowl ten times. Then you will attempt to get a glimpse at your future love life or your future with your special someone by looking at the shapes at the bottom of your bowl and being very creative about what they could possibly look like."

Monty asked, "Did you make this all up?"

"Oh no, this method is in one of my Divination books, I swear," she said with a laugh.

"This is so lame," Sirius said as he and the others got in line to get their petals and leaves. As they stood in line Professor Fangora got bowls from the cabinet in the back of the room and passed them out to them.

"Um, Professor?" James called. "Sirius is going to need at least five."

"Why is that?" she asked.

"One for every girl."

Everyone who had heard this laughed.

"In fact, maybe you just shouldn't participate in this, Padfoot," Remus said to him. "I don't think you have enough hairs on your head."

James and Peter laughed even harder, and Sirius just rolled his eyes.

Once the boys were seated back at their table with their four bowls, three of them with purple flower petals inside and one with yellow, all of them but Sirius started selecting hairs from their heads to pull out. Sirius, who never listened very intently to instructions, was already grinding his petals unceremoniously.

When they were all done, they picked up their bowls and peered into them searchingly. The first comment to come out was Sirius saying, "What the hell?"

They broke out into laughter.

"This doesn't look like _anything,_" James said.

"I think I can kind of see a...ladle," Remus said, turning his bowl. "Or is it a burrow?"

"Doesn't a burrow usually symbolize a secret or something?" Peter asked.

He shrugged. "Don't know what that's supposed to mean."

"Seeing anything, gentlemen?" asked Professor Fangora as she passed.

"Nothing," James answered.

"Well, let me have a look," she said, walking around to stand behind him and taking his bowl. As she studied it carefully, a look of recognition settled on her face. "Well, here's a bell. That means marriage. That's a happy thing to have in your bowl."

"Way to go, Prongs," Sirius said half-jokingly, leaning back in his chair and giving a couple applauding claps.

"Wait a minute," Fangora said with interest, looking even closer in James's bowl. "Wow, this is a very complex fortune, Mr. Potter. You have double-meaning symbols in here...Oh. Oh, _that's_ not happy at all..."

The faces of the four boys fell in unexpected disappointment.

"This is saying...This means that if you go through with that commitment with the person you love...then it's going to...mean death for both of you." She said the last part so quietly that they could hardly hear it, as if she wasn't sure she should actually be telling them or not.

The boys eyed each other with very uneasy looks, and Professor Fangora looked at them and immediately forced a smile. "Well, come on. You can't take these things seriously. I mean, you're not actually thinking about marriage at your age, anyway. Are you, Mr. Potter?" She looked down at him, not necessarily expecting an answer. "Like I said, this isn't even usually meant for wizards who are sixteen or seventeen years old."

With that, she walked away to go assist another table. The four continued to look at each other uncomfortably, and then Sirius barked loudly in short laughter.

"What the heck was that all about?" he wondered.

"No kidding," Peter said. "I thought this was supposed to be a fun and light activity."

"I wonder if she got in a row with her husband over the weekend or something," Remus said casually. "Being mad can make you misread predictions, can't it?"

"I bet that's it," Peter said.

Sirius, who was leaning back with his feet on the table chewing on a quill now and had completely forgotten about his own bowl, rolled his head lazily to the side at James, who didn't look like he was even listening to their optimistic explanations. He nudged him with his elbow. "Hey. You're not actually buying that rubbish, are you?"

James sat up, snapping into reality, and looked at him. "Oh. Yeah...No, of course I'm not. I mean, that sounds ridiculous."

"Yeah, it does," Peter agreed. "How is marrying Lily going to result in you both dying? Unless you drive each other so crazy you kill each other?"

James forced a laugh as the others chuckled. But as soon as they looked away from him again, he felt his smile fall.

* * *

Shortly after the last class had gotten out that day, James was walking away from his Charms class toward the dormitories by himself, his hands in the pockets of his robes and his face looking down at his feet dolefully. Because he wasn't looking where he was going, he ran right into a girl who had been turned toward the wall of the hallway talking to a friend she was now waving goodbye to. He said, "Sorry, excuse me" and turned to face her, only to see that it was Lily. As soon as their eyes met something was already wrong; once she recognized it was him she looked very sorry for some reason, and in a strange way he didn't really want to see her right now.

"James," she said, "I couldn't find you at lunch."

"I was outside," he explained.

"Oh. Well...I'm really sorry, but I promised Noriko she could interview me for this paper she has to do for Muggle Studies, and she thinks the only night she'll have a lot of time to work on it is tonight."

James registered what this meant and then said, "Oh. That's fine."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean for it to be so inconvenient," she said almost shyly, looking genuinely regretful. "I'll still be able to meet you later, but it'll just be late."

"That's okay, it's no big deal," he said. "You can just find me later tonight, then."

"Okay," she said, smiling with a kind of forced relief. Then she tilted her head to the side questioningly and said, "You alright?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Okay," she said again. Then for a moment it seemed to be the time she should kiss him goodbye before walking away, but for some reason it just wouldn't happen in the chilled space between them for that instant. She just said, "I'll see you later," and turned to walk away.

James watched her sadly as she left, not bothering to continue walking himself, and wondering what was wrong with him. He was almost relieved that he and Lily weren't having a date early tonight. He didn't know if he would be able to act normally happy with her after what he had heard Professor Fangora say today.

He didn't understand why it was affecting him so much. That prediction didn't even make any sense. How could they be in such serious danger like that in their future?

As he started walking slowly, his foot slid on something that was on the floor. He looked down and saw that someone had dropped a few pages of today's _Daily Prophet _that were now under his foot. Before even leaning over to look at it the headline on the top page caught his eye: "Investigations Reveal Possible Pattern In Death Eater Targets." James leaned over and picked up the page. Beside the article was a moving photograph of the ruins of a building that Death Eaters had destroyed. Suspended in the air above the charred, smoking ruin was the Dark Mark, the snake slithering in and out of the eyes and gaping mouth of the skull. As James stared at it, the pitch black voids of its hollow eyes seemed to bulge and stare right through him.

A sudden freezing thought entered his head right then. All of the students at the school were living away from home inside the cozy, safe wallsof Hogwarts, and James had lost himself in the routine school life and forgotten about the threat of the Death Eaters just like everyone else did as soon as they were done reading the latest news on the subject. But what if it was something much more serious than they realized? What if things were happening in the magic world that were going to change their lives forever as all of the students sat in class all day trying not to doze off as they took notes? What if this Death Eater problem was going to go on a lot longer than most realized?

Maybe the prediction Professor Fangora had made when looking into his bowl made a lot more sense than it seemed. Lily was Muggle-born, after all. Couldn't that mean that she could be in some danger in the future if this threat continued until then? Couldn't that mean that by association with her, he could end up in danger, too?

James dropped the paper to the floor and crossed his arms uncomfortably. What if the prediction was true? What could he do about it? If he never ended up marrying Lily, would she still die and he just wouldn't because he wouldn't be at the wrong place at the wrong time with her?

_Don't be stupid_, James thought to himself. _Nobody is going to die_.

But no matter what he told himself, he couldn't seem to relax. He was bothered the rest of the day, and unconsciously made the decision to spend it by himself in the library where he could read to distract himself, the last place Lily would think to find him on a day that teachers weren't likely to give enough homework to keep him there until very late at night.


	8. The Crystal Ship

Author's Note: OK, finally another nice, really long chapter to satisfy you all. I think you guys will like this one. I'm pleased to inform you that reading Book 6 has inspired me to work on this story again which I've had lying around on my hard drive for almost two years now, and I am in the middle of writing chapter 15. Just from estimating, I'd say we're looking at about eighteen chapters for the whole story. So yeah, quite a lot longer than "Preludes", just as I promised. A couple chapters after this one is where things are really going tostart picking up, and Snape will start to have a bigger part in the story.Happy reading.

* * *

Sirius didn't meet Sophia anywhere in specific because they now knew where they were always likely to find each other in the castle. One of the places Sophia liked to be by herself was a very quiet hallway on the second floor with large pointed arch windows. He quietly walked down this hallway and found her sitting in one of these windows with one leg resting up against the pane and one dangling freely, not reading as she usually did here but just watching the snow fall outside where the sun had almost completely gone down. 

She gasped when Sirius's face popped up out of nowhere right next to hers. "Hello, beautiful."

"God, Sirius!" she said, shoving his shoulder. "Don't do that."

"Sorry," he said. He reached into his back pocket and took out the book he had borrowed from her. "I'm done with this."

"Already?" she asked. "If I'd known you weren't just the light reading type I would have given you some of Thoreau's actual work."

"I think I got the idea, though," he said, handing the book to her. "Very interesting."

"Really? You liked it?" she said in an uncharacteristically bright tone as she slid down from the window onto her feet. "What was your favorite part?"

"All the parts you had underlined."

"All of them? Are you serious?"

"Yeah, I liked how you had all those quotes marked. I thought it was adorable."

"Oh, shut up! That's not what I meant."

"No, honestly...I did like it. 'No man should have to count more than his ten fingers.' Brilliant."

She looked up at him with a very surprised expression, as if she never would have expected him to have taken such devoted mental notes while reading it after hearing the way he was talking about the play seconds before.

"Well...thanks for giving it back so soon," she said, looking down at the book, which didn't look nearly as new as it had when she'd given it to him and appeared to have spent time in his back pocket on several occasions. She looked back up at him and said in a new, changing-of-subject way, "You're not going to be all cheesy with me now because it's Valentine's Day, are you?"

"Of course not," he said. "Me?" He looked around suddenly to see if anyone else was around, and then he took her hand, stepping out into the middle of the hall a little. He looked back at her with his thought completed. "Want to do something against the rules?"

"Absolutely," she answered right away.

He started leading her down the hall toward the nearest staircase.

"Where are we going?" Sophia asked.

"Just wait and find out," he said.

Sophia did wait and find out, not asking him any other questions until they stopped in the hall where the entrance to the Room of Requirement was.

"There's nothing here, Sirius," she told him as she saw him seem to be looking for a door.

"Oh yes, there is," he said. "There's a room here you can't find unless you need to find it."

"What kind of room?"

"Whatever kind of room you need to find."

She looked at him with her eyebrows drawn together and crossed her arms as he lifted up a tapestry on the wall. "Sirius, are you off your rocker?"

He opened a door under the tapestry and her eyes widened as light poured out from inside a room.

"How did you...?" she started as he took her hand again and pulled her inside.

The room was large and round and was lit by about a dozen torches circling around the wall. In the middle of the room were two very large burgundy couches facing each other that were separated by a large polished wood table. On the table sat a tall bottle of butterbeer and two wine glasses.

Sirius scratched his hand through his hair unsurely. "Er...I didn't think you'd be the candlelight dinner type, I...thought this might be a suitable alternative."

Sophia seemed to be more concerned with how this was possible than with the selection of atmosphere. "You don't mean to say you did this?"

"No, I didn't do this. I mean yes, I...sorta did. You see, this room automatically supplies you with anything you need. My friends and I took forever to figure out what it did after we found it one night."

"You mean only you and your friends know about this?"

"Yeah. Except maybe the teachers do. I'm thinking this was probably once used for a classroom. I can definitely see how it could be inconvenient for all the students to know how it can be used, though..."

"Like how we're using it right now?"

"Yes, exactly."

She looked around and laughed. "How in the world did you guys find this place?"

"Oh, I know my way around the school better than any of the teachers probably do."

"How?"

"By always being up to no good," he said mysteriously.

She laughed again and then said, "Well, are we going to sit down or what?"

They sat in one of the couches and forty minutes later had drank almost all of the butterbeer and taken their shoes, sweaters, and ties off and had their feet curled up comfortably on the couch. They were talking more calmly, no longer roaring with laughter as they had been for a while, which had actually resulted in one of the wine glasses getting dropped and broken.

At one point in their conversation they somehow got on the subject of physical fights with family members. After Sirius told her about a time Regulus had tripped him down the stairs, Sophia explained how one day when she was seven her dad had been in a bad mood and had kept taking it out on her and yelling at her about everything she did.

"...So at one point I was outside and he was really pissed and started telling me over and over again to go wash the dirt off my hands, but I pretended not to hear him because he was making me mad. So after about the fifth time he yelled at me I just stood up and started walking away, and he hexed me."

"Your father _hexed_ you?" Sirius asked in surprise.

"Yeah," she said, undoing the top two buttons of her shirt. "He took out his wand and just attacked me from behind. It knocked me out for ten minutes and I was seeing stars the rest of the day. I got this scar." She pulled her shirt down her left shoulder and turned to show him a very faint line about as long as a fingernail on her back near her shoulder blade.

"How could he just do that to his kid?" Sirius asked. She was talking about it in an almost humorous way, but he didn't find it very funny.

She shrugged as she pulled the collar of her shirt back up, leaving the buttons undone so that it was comfortably loose around her neck. "He's the one person that nobody in my family really likes. That was the same year my mum got fed up with him and she took me to move in with her sister. The last thing I heard was that he had gone to a Muggle prison for getting in a fist fight in public. My mum just got remarried a couple years ago to a much nicer guy."

He looked at her a little sadly and then turned his face forward, staring off in space as he said the next thing. "I saw the last of my parents this New Year's Eve. I ran away from my family. My cousin eloped with this Muggle-born, and I couldn't stand the way they treated her for it. That was just the last straw, you know?"

"Well, sometimes parents are just ridiculous about wanting their kids to have good status and be successful in their marriages," she told him. "Even if their ideas of what's acceptable are repulsive, the way they reacted was probably out of love for her. And I'm sure they didn't really want you to leave."

"You don't understand. My mum practically gave me a helping kick out the door once I mentioned the consideration that I would leave."

Sophia looked at him with a fully sympathetic expression. "But it couldn't have been the way you say it was. I mean...my dad wasn't a very good person, but I know that in a weird way he did love me. Your mother must love you at least a little bit."

Sirius's eyes showed tremendous inner struggle for a moment, and then he resolved, "I guess...I guess she must have at some point, before I was old enough to question the things I had been brought up to believe. I don't want to think that there are people so hateful that they can just forget about their love for people like that...but I've grown up seeing so much hatred that to me it's believable. I've never known love in that house. Never." He paused, sighing, and continued, "I don't like the person that's turned me into. I've tried so hard not to be like the people in my family, and I've only become a different thing I don't want to be. I don't see the good things in people and forgive them anything like Lily does. I'm not heroic and morally impulsive like James. I'm just bitter and I hold grudges against everybody who's like my parents. I mean, let's face it: just because I've managed to be above my family and their bullshit, that doesn't make me a saint. That's not enough, is it?"

Sophia waited until he turned to look at her face and said, "No one's asking you to be a saint. You don't have to be perfect."

He stared at her for a quiet moment, and then as he leaned forward she closed her eyes expectantly. He kissed her face gently at the corner of her lip and she leaned closer into him. Then over her shoulder he saw the torches burning on the wall and the deep red color of the couch, which was not what the room usually looked like when he brought girls down here for dates. Already this felt completely different from all those other times, and suddenly he felt an unfamiliar kind of discomfort that closely resembled guilt. Without really understanding why he pulled a few inches away so he could see her eyes and whispered, "This is okay?"

In answer she just brought her face up next to his, turning her head so that the part of her neck and shoulder that was still exposed from when she had showed him the scar was right before him offeringly. He put his mouth to her neck there and his hands to her hips. Everything would move from there. As the night got older, they became more and more deeply entangled together on the couch, her hands raked through his long hair and his hands feeling her waist under her shirt, both of them always with their eyes closed, searching and knowing each other in complete darkness.

* * *

After Lily finished working with Noriko she went to the Great Hall to have a late dinner by herself, as she imagined all of her friends had already eaten. She found that there were only a few small groups of students there, and most of them were studying, not eating what was left of the food from dinner. But she did see one person who was eating, sitting all by himself at the far end of the Slytherin table. She blinked her eyes slowly for a moment and braced herself, and then she walked over to the table and sat down right next to Severus Snape. 

He saw her out of the corner of his eye and for a long time said nothing. She couldn't imagine he was actually grateful to have her company, but for some reason it just felt like the right thing to do. Even if he wasn't thrilled about it, he certainly wasn't completely objecting considering he let her stay there and didn't say anything rude.

Finally he looked to the side at her and asked, "So where is dear James?"

She looked at him unaffectedly and answered, "I don't know. I had some other things to take care of so we're spending most of the night apart."

"Hm." He took one of the last apples from a large gold dish and said, "Seems like an awfully strange way for Gryffindor's sweethearts to spend Valentine's Day."

She cut herself a slice of bread and said nothing in response to that. "And what about you? Where are all of your friends?"

He scoffed. "With their future Pureblood marriage partners." He paused, looking down at his plate. "And they're not my friends."

Lily waited a moment before saying quietly, "I know."

"I know what you would think, but that's not something to be sorry about," he said quickly. "I don't need them. None of us need each other."

"That's fine, as long as the feelings are mutual," she said. "Well...lack of feelings, that is."

"What, you think your relationships with people are so much stronger?" he said a little snappingly. "You're so naive that you'll trust anyone. What about James?" he asked a little more quietly. "Are you sure he's the noble hero you think he is? Didn't you ever think he could have been worrying about saving himself from expulsion just as much as saving me that night?"

Lily decided it was best not to try to explain how James hadn't been responsible for the prank in any way, so that couldn't be true. Snape wasn't going to understand no matter what. And besides that, if she defended James and made him sound like a good person for not being the mind behind what had happened, it would suggest that she thought Sirius wasn't a good person, which wasn't true at all.

"Because you would even suggest it I can see you don't know him at all," she said calmly. "That's why you think he's so much worse than he is. And that's why I forgive you."

"Forgive me!" he spat back at her in disgust. "When have I ever asked it of you?"

"You'd have to know what you've done to need forgiveness for in order to do that, Severus."

"Don't call me by my first name. Why don't you just hate me like the rest of your friends and stop pitying me?"

"Because I know you've never hated me. You can't because I've never done anything to you."

"I do hate you! You're everything I hate! A worthless, filthy Mudbl-" For some reason as he met eyes with her in the midst of his hissing, he couldn't finish the word. Her calmness was infuriating. Why _couldn't _he hate her? _Didn't_ he?

Lily slowly looked forward away from him. "I'm sorry I bothered you, Severus." She stood up with her plate and he said nothing to stop her as she walked away to another table.

* * *

Their ears and noses pink from walking around Hogsmeade in the cold winter air, Remus and Madelin returned from a long outing and went up to the entrance to her common room. The portrait that covered the entrance to the Hufflepuff tower was on a wall by a set of stairs, which Remus and Madelin stopped at the bottom of to say their last words before parting. She giggled when he picked her up around the waist and set her on the step above his so that he didn't have to look down to talk to her. 

"Thanks for taking me out again," she said.

"Did you have fun?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Really?" he said a little timidly. "I mean...do you _really_ have fun with me?"

"Yeah. Of course," she said, laughing quietly.

"Alright...Sorry, that was stupid to ask. I mean..."

She giggled. "Are you trying to say something, Remus?"

He smiled. "I just like you a lot."

She giggled again girlishly as if she was nervous. "Ah, Remus...Goodnight." She leaned forward and kissed his jaw, which was the highest of him she was level with even when standing a step above him.

"Goodnight," he said back as she went up the steps. She murmured a password to the king in the portrait and then stepped through the hole in the wall after the painting lifted up. As Remus walked away, he was very glad no one was there to see him unable to stop smiling to himself.

* * *

Lily had ended up being busy with Noriko almost all night, and James hadn't even been thinking about the fact that she would be looking for him afterwards and he had gone to his room at 9:30 after leaving the library. He was so detached from the present that he did not pay much attention to how strange it was when Sirius never showed up to go to bed at 10:00, even though Peter and Remus were very confused and brought it up every fifteen minutes that he continued to be absent. It was very much to Sirius's benefit thatJames was Head Boy; not only did he never turn in his friends when they broke the rules, but he was usually quite reluctant to exercise his authority and was always lenient about his responsibility to check that all the boys were in bed. After Peter and Remus were too tired to talk anymore, they got quiet in their beds and started to go to sleep. But James did not feel tired at all, and he tried to sleep for only about twenty minutes before getting out of bed and quietly sneaking down to the common room. 

It took him a while to notice that the piano was playing on its own as it had used to do all the time. He was so used to the sound he hardly heard it anymore. Remus seemed to have bewitched it to play various love songs, and right now it was softly keying "My Funny Valentine."

As he stood in front of the fireplace the same thoughts he had been having all day bothered him all over again. He hated this. He shouldn't even have had to be worrying right now about whether or not he was going to one day get married to Lily or not. He should have just been able to live in the present and wait for where things would go. But because of the possibilities that had been brought to his attention, he was now worrying about how any kind of future with her at all was possibly threatened. He knew this wasn't the way people were supposed to live. But at the same time, how could he just go on pretending everything was fine with everything he knew was going on in the world?

Something soft glided by his ankle, and he looked down and saw Lily's cat, Galadriel. He leaned over and picked her up, holding her and stroking her white fur for a few seconds. Then he heard someone walking up quietly behind him.

"James?"

The cat was dropped to the floor and pounced away silently, and James turned around and took Lily's wrist, pulling her to him. Before she could say anything he had his face buried in her shoulder and was hugging her so tightly that her heels lifted a little from the floor and the top of her pajamas came up to reveal her midriff. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and asked him, "Are you really all right?"

"Yeah," he said quietly.

"Are you sure?" she asked as her hand went up to where his hair started at the back of his neck.

"Yes, just listen," he said. "Lily, I know I'm always subtle with you. And I know I'm not the most emotional person...But you do mean everything to me. If anything ever happened to you, I'd go crazy."

"Nothing is going to happen to me," she assured in a voice that seemed to reveal that she already understood what he meant and what he was worried about.

"I know. But I just..."

"James," she said gently as she pulled out of his arms enough to look him in the eyes. "Everything's going to be okay. I promise."

He gave a small nod. Then she smiled and there was nothing more he could say to her. Her hand on his neck moved to his upper back, her arm circling around him and pulling herself closer to him. Every dark thought in his mind was violently chased away as their lips met. The kiss deepened naturally and in the calm quiet of the common room, James felt everything restored to the way it should be.

* * *

In the Room of Requirement, the atmosphere was very different than it had been a while before. Sophia was lying across Sirius with her head resting on his chest and her eyes closed. They felt no need to talk to each other but simply lay on the couch in silence. The torches surrounding them on the walls seemed to be burning with less tall flames now, giving off a soft, constant glow instead of a blazing and flickering light as they had been earlier. 

Sirius knew Sophia was awake because she opened her eyes and yawned every once in a while. Then after a while she seemed to realize she needed to stay awake and kept her eyes open staring off into space for a while, but then when she spoke for the first time in a while it was clear she'd been thinking about things while lying there.

"Sirius, I don't know why I was put in the house I'm in, you know," she said in a way of having wanted to say this to him for a long time. "I was in that line to be sorted on my first day with all of these terrified kids, and I just remember not understanding what they were so scared about. I didn't care what house I was going to be sorted into. Whichever one it was, I figured I would be fine in it if that's where I was put. I didn't expect it to work out so awkwardly. But I don't know which house other than Slytherin I could belong in. It probably wouldn't have worked out any better for me no matter what. All I know is I used to hear all about you and your friends and how much attention you brought to yourselves by causing trouble, and I kind of thought it would be fun to know all of you. So for a while, I think maybe I wished I was in Gryffindor instead. Or at least...in any other house, so that to people like you and James I would appear decent enough to talk to."

Sirius thought about what she had just said for a long moment. Then he said, "The most common trait of Slytherin students that I've always noticed is their lack of dependence on other people. People like them can be disgusting the way they'll put their own needs before others and bring others down for their own good. Even the friendships and relationships they have now are just for security. Narcissa and Malfoy never would have picked each other to date without the convenience of them both being Pureblood. I can't imagine they actually love each other. That's why even though I've always thought of their kind as being despicable, I've also always thought of them as being really lonely kinds of people. In a way they themselves can't even grasp because they're so lost in their principles of perfection.

"But you're different because you don't even rely on others as a way to keep yourself up. You have no interest in befriending people just to use them because you're willing to go through everything on your own. You knew on your first day of school that it didn't matter what kind of people you were sorted into the same house as, because you don't depend on the people you're around to help you succeed. Not depending on other people is a very ambitious way to live, and maybe that's why you belong in your house best. But not needing any other people at all is also lonely in its own way."

Sophia was so silent that she almost seemed to have fallen asleep when she had actually listened to his every word. She sighed tiredly and stretched her arm around Sirius, hugging his chest. He rubbed his hand down her back and asked, "Do you want me to take you downstairs?"

She opened her eyes and said, "No, not yet."

"Okay. I know where in the castle you can get some food this late so I'm going to go get something. You hungry?"

She shook her head.

"Alright." He rolled her off of him and kissed her head between her eyes as she started to close them again, and then he got up and left.

Fifteen minutes later he came back with a banana and some bread and she was still curled up on the couch, her stomach moving gently as she breathed. He sat on the table in front of her and said, "Sophia?"

She just continued to lay there silently. Sirius noticed there was a folded blanket on the arm of the couch that hadn't been there before. He unfolded it and put it over her. He felt kind of strange as he did it. Everything about tonight wasn't the kind of thing he was used to. If someone like Victoria Knightley had fallen asleep in this room when he'd taken her here, he didn't know how he might have reacted. He might have been insulted. He might have not cared and figured she was at fault if he left her there. He might have gotten a little annoyed because of how bad it would look in the morning if he didn't leave her. But right now, he couldn't really care less that Sophia had fallen asleep.

In fact, he kind of liked staying there with her and watching her. Eventually he got tired as well and dozed off on the other couch.


	9. Good Vibrations

Sirius woke up shortly before Sophia did and found that the room had supplied them with a small breakfast on the table. When she started to stir he went and sat on the table and nudged her shoulder to make her open her eyes. "Hey."

She looked up at him and just smiled calmly. Then her eyes wandered around the room and widened.

"Shit!" she said, bolting up into a sitting position. "I didn't fall asleep on you, did I?"

"Actually, yeah, that's pretty much what happened," he laughed.

"Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. You must have had no idea what to do with me."

"Don't worry about it. We'd already missed head-count time anyway, there wasn't really any point in going back to the dormitories. You want some bacon?"

"Sure." She took some to eat and then started to laugh. "You know, this is going to look really bad to the people who noticed us missing."

"I know."

When they were done eating they discovered that there were two neatly folded, clean uniforms waiting for them on the floor, one with Slytherin colors and one with Gryffindor colors. Standing at separate ends of the room were two screens for them to change behind (Sirius was only joking as he said, "What are those for?" but Sophia wasn't particularly modest and was all right with just trusting him to look away while she took off the clothes she'd slept in and changed into the fresh ones). There were two shiny gold sinks next to each other against one wall with cabinets above that each had a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a hair brush inside. It was quite funny for them to stand next to each other brushing their teeth and tidying up, and for a while they joked around with each other, talking like they were married ("Have a good day at work, honey," Sophia said as they were leaving, pretending to be kissing him goodbye at the door).

Assuming their other clothes would still be there if they came back later, they left the room and went directly to the Great Hall.

"Hey, I've got an idea," he said to her as they were walking to the Gryffindor table with their arms around each other's waists. "Let's let them believe something actually happened last night."

She laughed. "Are they gonna fall for it?"

"James won't, but he'll go along with it." Right at that moment everyone noticed them coming. "Hey, guys!"

"Well, good morning," Remus said as he and Sophia sat down. "Where the heck were you all night?"

"Where do you think?" Sirius said suggestively.

Remus rolled his eyes. "Well, what kept you that long? You could have gotten in trouble if McGonagall found out you weren't there. She probably wouldn't even have believed us if we told her we honestly didn't know where you were."

"Yeah, what were you guys doing the whole time anyway?" James asked. "Certainly you didn't spend the _whole _night in the Room of...yeah," he lowered his voice. Sirius and Sophia just looked down at their plates, smiling mysteriously.

"Wait," Peter said.

"There is no way," Lily said with hopeful certainty.

"You didn't really...?" Remus said, mostly doubtfully.

James started laughing.

"I guess they underestimate us, babe," Sirius said as he put his arm around Sophia's shoulders. She laughed and turned to kiss him, and had barely pulled away when-

"Black! Stabbard!" yelled Professor Constantine as he marched up to them. "If you would please minimize your public displays of mindless infatuation! And _you_, young lady," he said, jabbing a rolled-up _Daily Prophet _in Sophia's direction. "Bellatrix reported that you were not in your room at 10:00. Now that I see her cousin here" - he pointed the paper at Sirius briefly, actually giving his shoulder a pretty hard whack - "I dare to imagine that you were with him. I'll have to be speaking with Professor McGonagall about his own attendance at lights-out."

"Well, if our Head Girl wasn't so desperate to get me in trouble all the time," Sophia began naturally and with convincing anger, "she would have waited a couple minutes and found that I was in the bathroom because my nose was bleeding, and that I came back at exactly five minutes after ten. As for Sirius, his roommates are right here and they can tell you themselves that he was in bed at the right time."

Constantine went completely silent and even seemed to be deprived of air for a couple seconds. He gave a quick, fierce glance at all of the students before him, and then before storming off he just said, "Hmph!" so forcefully he almost breathed fire.

Everyone laughed as he walked away. Even Madelin, who was sitting with Remus and who Sirius had almost expected to blurt out the truth to Constantine, was giggling with a guilty smile, obviously not used to this kind of amusement. Sirius just hugged Sophia around her hips and said, "I adore you."

At that exact moment, while everyone was distracted and laughing, Snape was walking by them on his way to the Slytherin table. He stopped as soon as he saw a uniform with silver and green clashing with the surrounding red and gold, looking right at Sophia. She met his gaze, her smile dropping, and they looked at each other like this for a moment, completely unnoticed by the others. But before either of them could budge into showing whatever emotion they were feeling on their face, he quickly retracted his gaze and sped off as if wanting to get away before anyone saw his and Sophia's acknowledgement of each other.

Sophia recovered from the moment and returned her attention to the rest of the table. Just then Professor Constantine suddenly appeared again, apparently not ready to give up.

"What am I thinking? Stabbard, get to your house table!" He pointed across the room furiously.

"Oh...But I'm finished," she said calmly.

"Then I excuse you from the Great Hall."

"Bullshit!" she let out, seemingly without meaning to.

"Now!"

She sighed and got up. "See you later, guys."

"It was nice seeing you, Sophia," Lily made sure to say as she left.

Sirius got up to follow her, taking a couple pieces of toast with him, and Constantine looked at him like he was a pest to be exterminated. Obviously no matter how sadistic he wanted to be there wasn't really any certain way he could bend the rules to deny him and Sophia of each other's company.

Once Constantine had walked off mumbling angrily and was gone again, the others were silenced for a moment, not exactly knowing how to react. Remus was the first one to speak.

"Am I just seeing things, or are those two completely out of their minds crazy for each other?" he asked.

The others laughed.

"No, you're right," James agreed. "I've never seen Sirius quite like this with anyone."

"Is it really getting that serious?" Peter asked. "I mean, did they really...?"

"Come on, Wormtail, do you really believe that? They probably just lost track of time and decided to screw the whole thing and stay out all night."

Peter seemed to breathe a sigh of relief for a moment.

"If it makes you feel any better," Madelin said to him, "he had me fooled for a second, too."

Remus laughed and took her hand under the table.

* * *

Everything seemed to only be getting better for the next few days. There was some kind of very contagious cheerfulness that spread following Valentine's Day. Even though the view through any castle window was still blindingly white from all of the snow outside, one would have thought it was spring with all of the smiles and laughing to be witnessed at Hogwarts. Large crowds of students were always out having fun in the snow, the older ones playing around just as loudly and immaturely as the younger ones. Even the Slytherins seemed happier than usual in a strange way, and couples like Bellatrix Black and Rodolphus Lestrange were suddenly kissing all the time in public. The doleful articles about Death Eaters were even getting to be less plentiful and less urgent in every paper, and James had completely forgotten his worries about the danger Professor Fangora had predicted.

One night when he and his friends were eating in the Great Hall they noticed that Sirius didn't seem to be showing up for dinner.

"Does he have detention?" Peter suggested.

"Not that I know of," James answered.

"Is he alright?" Lily asked him.

"Alright? Have you seen Sirius lately? I think Sophias the best thing that could happen to him. He seems to have finally forgotten about all that stuff with his family that happened over Christmas."

"Well, that's good," she said. "You know, I'm really happy that Sirius is actually getting close to someone. He can be so distrusting. And I really like Sophia a lot."

"Well, you know, it's because of me that he's always so distrusting," Remus said quietly. "That's why he didn't even want to let us get too close to _you_ at first."

Lily looked at him with an alarmed expression and said, "Remus, that's not completely true. You can't put all the blame on yourself."

"What are you talking about?" Madelin asked confusedly.

Remus almost jumped. Now he knew why Lily had given him that look. For a moment, he'd forgotten it wasn't just the five of them talking as usual. Madelin had started eating with him almost all the time now, taking advantage of the teachers leniency in enforcing the unspoken rule that students must eat with their houses. He had become so used to her that he'd let down his guard and hadn't thought twice before he spoke.

"Oh, nothing," he said to her. "It's a long story. Ask me later."

James got done eating first and decided to go upstairs to see if he could find Sirius. When he went through the portrait hole he found that some potently psychedelic music was filling the common room coming from Sirius's record player on one of the end tables, but the room seemed to be empty. James started to cross the room to go up to the boys dormitories but was stopped when Sirius's head poked up over the back of the couch in front of the fireplace. It looked like he had been lying down on it before James came in.

"Sirius, what the bloody hell are you doing?" he asked. "It's sure not like you to skip food for a nap."

Then he heard a small giggle and suddenly understood. Sophia sat up and appeared over the back of the couch, immediately leaning her head into Sirius's chest as they both laughed.

"Oh man, we thought you were somebody else when we heard you come in," Sirius explained. "I thought I was going to have to hide her under the table."

James laughed, a little embarrassed for him. "Well, I'm sorry I...interrupted."

"No problem," Sophia said as she got up and walked out into the middle of the room. "I guess I should get going if people are starting to get done with dinner."

"Um, you missed a...er..." James pointed shyly at a slightly gaping part of her shirt where a button had been left undone.

"Oh!" She buttoned it back up casually and smiled. "Thanks."

"I'll see you tomorrow, Sophie," Sirius called. "If you think you can remember the password and get past anyone seeing you, I'm probably going to skip my last class and hang out here tomorrow."

"Okay. But you know what, why did we go here in the first place instead of just hanging out in that room?"

Sirius looked at her questioningly for a second. "Room?"

"Yeah, you know, the room that has whatever you need. What's it called?"

"The Room of Requirement. Wait, you mean you remember that?"

"Of course I remember, are you on drugs? Whatever, I'll see you later."

After she left through the portrait hole, James turned to Sirius. "Looks like things are getting pretty serious."

"Shut up," he said right away, failing to hide a smile as he hopped over the couch to stand in front of James.

"Well, I don't recall you ever bringing any Ravenclaws or Hufflepuffs into our common room before."

He gave up, smiling and running his hand through his hair, which was almost unnoticeably a little messed up. "I didn't feel right taking her into the Room of Requirement. I don't know why."

"Yeah you do," James laughed in a don't-be-stupid tone.

Sirius laughed, too. "Yeah, you're right. I guess I might as well know what I've got while I've got it." He sat down in front of James. "You know?"

Sirius could be vague like this sometimes and James would completely understand what he was talking about. "Yeah."

"Well, I think I'll go pick off some leftovers downstairs," Sirius said as he got up. "Keep this a secret if you don't mind. I can just picture how Wormtail would freak out."

"My thoughts exactly," James said.

And with that established, Sirius left through the portrait hole and James went up to his room.


	10. Back To The Family

Sirius was in the library browsing through a vacated and quiet section to see if he could find something useful for an essay he had to write for Potions. He had picked up a volume to look at when he felt someone's hands move around his waist.

"Hey, Sophia," he said casually.

"It's not Sophia," said a disgusted voice behind him.

He almost dropped the book. When he spun around he found himself face-to-face with Victoria Knightley.

"Hi, Vic," he said flatly.

"I heard you've been seen all over the place with that awful vixen Stabbard," she said angrily. "It seems that it's true."

"What's it to you?"

"What's it to me?" she said in disbelief. "What am _I_ to you, I think that's the question."

He shrugged. "Not much, it looks like."

Her jaw dropped in horror just as Sophia appeared as if on cue, apparently having been somewhere close enough to recognize Sirius's voice from a few aisles away. "Hey," she said calmly. "What's going on?"

As she started to step closer to them Victoria just groaned and stormed off, but not before purposefully walking too close to Sophia as she passed her so that her leg made her trip.

"Hey!" Sirius yelled after her as he caught Sophia before she fell to the floor. She quickly got to her feet again and lunged after Victoria angrily, but Sirius held her back.

"What did you do that for?!" he called.

Victoria turned back around and said, "How can you be so interested in_ her_? For the sake of Merlin, she's a _Slytherin!_"

"I don't care," Sirius said, stepping in front of Victoria to look at her dangerously. "She's still my girl and I'm still going to hex you so bad you won't know what hit you if you can't be nice to her."

She took a sharp intake of breath and looked for a moment like she was going to explode into annoying, loud tears. But instead she just turned again and stomped away. She was not even close to being out of earshot before Sophia and Sirius broke out into laughter.

"Be a little easy on her," Sophia said. "She obviously just can't get over you. Who the hell was that, anyway?"

"Victoria Knightley," he sighed. "Fifth year. Killer legs, but what an obnoxious nag."

She laughed again. "Did you at least let her down easy?"

"No, I never really broke it off," he said. "I just kind of forgot about her once I met you, I guess."

She looked surprised. "Well, no wonder she's mad."

"She wasn't my girlfriend or anything!" Sirius defended himself. "It should have been enough for me to stop talking to her. Most people would get the point."

Sophia smirked and didn't say anything. Sirius picked up the book off the ground which he had dropped before catching her fall. He put it back on the bookshelf in between two random books where it didn't belong and looked back at her. She was reading the spines of the books for something that looked interesting, or at least making it appear that that was what her attention was focused on.

"Hey," he said, putting a finger under her chin and turning her head up towards him. "You know I'm never going to treat you that way, right?"

She didn't answer, but just looked at his face for a moment in a way that made Sirius feel a tug in his chest, and then kissed him slowly. It was the kind of kiss that made him lose track of how much time went by so that when he finally opened his eyes again he was surprised to find light all around them coming through the castle windows.

Sophia kept her arms circled around his neck, leaning back against the bookshelf. "Do you promise every girl that?"

"Of course not," he said back right away.

Seeing his look of surprise, she said, "It's not that I care; I just wondered if you were ever with anybody before who you...well..._thought _you'd actually be with a long time."

He took her face in both of his hands and looked straight in her eyes. "Look, Sophie, I don't know about these things. I don't think about them much. But all I know is this is different."

She accepted that answer with a soft smile. "But in any case it's not quite fair to promise someone that you'll never hurt them like that," she said quietly. "You never know what could happen. Sometimes you can't even help the way things go wrong."

"I know nothing will go wrong."

"How?"

"Well, it's not like I've ever_ really _hurt anybody before," he answered.

She looked at him very skeptically. "How do you know?"

He thought about that for a moment. "Because...none of the girls I've been with ever knew me well enough to really love me."

Her brow lifted in surprise at the simplicity of his answer. She thought for a few seconds and then said, "Getting rejected still isn't very fun."

"Rejection is a humbling experience," he defended.

"Maybe you should be rejected some time, then."

He shrugged. "Maybe I should be."

She took hold of his tie to pull him forward to kiss him again, and then after a couple seconds she pulled away. "I can't be doing this! If I don't work on an assignment I have for Transfiguration I'm going to be killing my grade in that class."

"Sorry," he said, even though he hadn't meant for them to run into each other. "My friends are around here somewhere if you want to work with us."

"I'll think about it. First I have to find a book on Animagi."

He told her that he'd be with the others at the study tables if she wanted to see him later. After they parted he found James, Peter, Lily, and Remus at a table in the middle of the library and his good mood was a little dampened by the fact that four tables next to them were completely inhabited by his least favorite Slytherin students. Most of them were being very loud about cheering for whoever they wanted to win a game of Wizard Chess being played by Launce Avery and Lucius Malfoy. Sirius's brother Regulus was sitting with a group of other young students who had piles of their gold sitting on a table that they seemed to be betting on the winner with.

"There you are," James said when Sirius sat down next to him.

"Hey," he said. "You got a dent put in this essay yet?"

"Yes, actually," said James. "I found a great book on the magical properties of herbs, since about ten of the ingredients in an energizing potion are herbs."

"Great. I never would have thought to look in the Herbology section. Have you-?"

"Hey, Regulus!" Bellatrix's haggardly cruel voice rang out above the rest of the talking coming from her group of friends. "Your brother's over there, you can tell him what your mother has been saying about him ever since he left."

This was apparently an already-used joke between them, and she had obviously been talking so that Sirius could hear her. He rolled his eyes and called, "That prat over there isn't my brother anymore, Bella, and I really don't give a rat's fat arse what she's been saying about me."

"Well, that's good," Regulus said, "because what she's been saying is absolutely nothing. She seems to have forgotten that you exist."

The Slytherins laughed.

"All the better for me," Sirius muttered, but James was giving him a sort of sympathetic look.

"In fact," Regulus elaborated, "before I left to go back to school I believe I noticed a couple holes burned into our lovely tapestry. Looks like Mum took care of all that remained in our family of you _and _that lousy Mudblood lover."

"Don't talk about Andy that way, you little piece of scum!" Sirius snapped, as a few students seated close stiffened their shoulders in reaction to the word Regulus had used. "You're too young to even know what you're talking about."

Pondering his next move on the chess board but obviously listening, Malfoy gave a slimy laugh and asked, "Who is Andy?"

"My older sister, Andromeda," said Narcissa, who was sitting beside him. "Ran off and married some Mudblood as proud as she pleased. It was completely shameful."

"If you all can't stop using that word around this lady," Remus said suddenly, glancing at Lily, "I might have to dig around in my bag and find what I did with my prefect badge and use it for once."

"_Oooh_," many of the Slytherins said, pretending to feel threatened.

"Remus, don't worry about it," Lily said quietly to him.

Suddenly Snape's voiced crawled out of nowhere; he had been sitting near the Black sisters and just smirking the whole time.

"Ah, poor Sirius," he said. "His mummy doesn't love him anymore. The only woman foolish enough to care a thing for him is a half-breed like Evans."

As the crowd around Snape laughed, Sirius flinched and clenched his fists. One beat later, Narcissa screamed as the book lying open on her lap burst into flames. Malfoy immediately pulled out his wand and extinguished it with a spell, and then the group just started laughing again as he brushed the ashes off of her skirt and tried to calm her down.

Sirius's friends were all looking at him tensely now, and Peter was sitting very still with his hands flat on the table as if afraid he would accidentally destroy something else any moment.

"Hey, mate," James said, putting a calming hand on Sirius's shoulder. "Dont get too wound up. It just amuses them more."

Remus started to stand up and Lily grabbed his wrist. "Please don't..."

"I'm just going to go get Madam Pince," he told her. "They're being too loud in here anyway."

She nodded and let go of him so he could walk to the front of the library.

"That's not entirely accurate, Severus," Bellatrix finally said in response to Snape's comment. "There's that hag who's dating him now."

"Oh, right, Bella," said Rodolphus Lestrange. "Sirius and Sophia. How befitting. They certainly deserve each other."

As Sirius drummed his fingernails on the table agitatedly, Lily suddenly lifted her face and James saw her looking at Snape as if searching for his reaction to the mention of Sophia, but he was remaining completely unreadable as always.

"Yeah, who do you think is worse, Dolph?" Bellatrix asked her boyfriend. "A traitor to his family or a traitor to her house?"

"Oh, hard to say," Lestrange said.

"It just goes to show how that lot seem to have the intention of creating the most dishonorable marriages possible in the future," Snape said. "A relative of Sirius's has married some Muggle-born filth and now Potter seems to be on his way down the same path."

James's eyes flared dangerously for a moment, but even so he whispered to Sirius, "Don't start anything, Padfoot."

"You're telling _me _not to start anything?" he hissed back much more audibly.

"Sirius," Lily said warningly. "Calm down." She could tell he was starting to get pushed over the edge, but even she couldn't see that under the table he was gripping the top of his wand tightly, ready to pull it out of his pocket at any moment.

"It's quite repulsive to think about," Malfoy said openly. "Couples like them and the worthless offspring they're bound to produce."

"That will only be if none of our friends we're reading about in the paper go after her kind and get them killed them first," Snape laughed.

James saw Sirius's wand fly out but was too reluctant to stop him now. Even as Lily yelled at him not to do anything, he shot up out of his chair, pointed his wand directly at Snape and shouted, "_Impedimenta!_"

Snape flew backwards out of his chair and was slammed against a book shelf standing ten feet away, groaning as he fell to the floor with a painful-sounding thump. His wand, which he had drawn quickly right after Sirius drew his, fell from his hand, and before he could pick it up Sirius had fallen on him and hit him very hard across the face.

"Sirius!" cried Lily, standing up from her seat.

Every single student rose from the tables and moved closer to the area where Sirius and Snape were rolling around on the floor fighting each other. Snape was only strong enough to put up a fight for a few seconds, though, and it wasn't long before Sirius had him pinned in one place with his hands around his neck.

"No!" Lily screamed.

Her shouts were joined by James yelling, "Hey! Stop it!" But their words were practically drowned out by all the other students' calls and cheers, and Sirius heard none of it. He just kept swearing at Snape and tightening his grip around his neck. He had forgotten about more subtle ways to fight with a wand; Snape was so weak and helpless that this way was so much more satisfying. The whole time Snape kept choking for air and trying to stretch his hand out for his wand, which lay on the floor just a few inches out of his reach, and clawing at Sirius's fingers with his other hand in a feeble attempt to make him let go.

"Come on, Severus!" shouted Avery while the other Slytherins also cheered for him uselessly. "Fight back!"

"Kick him! Get him!" yelled one of Regulus's friends.

"_Leave him alone!_" Lily shouted hopelessly, just as James grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to the side to run past her and then went after the two.

"Sirius!" he said, grabbing him around the chest and trying to pull him off. "Come on, Padfoot! Let go of him! Come on, there you go…"

It was only then that Sirius's grip finally loosened. He practically went completely slack and let James pull him away, still breathing in furious, gasping breaths. Snape was breathing even harder, though, regaining air as his face turned from a ghostly white back to his normal paleness. Then as soon as he had recovered he seized his wand and pointed it at Sirius-

"_Expelliarmus!_" Lily incanted with her wand now outstretched, her voice exhausted and weak-sounding but the spell working nevertheless. Snape's wand flew from his grip toward her. As soon as she caught it everyone's gazes started turning toward the two who had just come from the front of the library; Remus had returned with the librarian, Madam Pince, who looked furious enough to make Sirius's temper seem cool and controlled.

"I'll have that, thank you," she said in sharp, pointy words, grabbing Snape's wand from Lily's hand. "Both of you get up and come with me this instant. I'm taking you directly to the heads of your houses. Thank you, Mr. Lupin," she dismissed Remus, who looked very confused and lost, and then looked at the rest of the crowd. "All of you sit back down or leave, it's over now."

The last thing Sirius's friends felt like doing was sitting back down, but they couldn't follow him and Snape, so they slowly walked back toward their table where their books and bags were.

On the way Bellatrix grabbed a handful of Lily's hair and pulled it to stop her. "Don't waste your sympathy, dear," she said poisonously. "Don't you see? It just makes him hate you more."

James came to her side looking angry, forcefully bumping into her so that she let go of Lily and gave him an ugly look of annoyance. He took Lily's hand and pulled her away, handing her her things which he had picked up from the table for her. The Slytherins continued to jeer and laugh at them as they walked off toward the entrance of the library with Peter and Remus.

On the way out Lily stopped in her tracks as they passed an aisle of books where someone was standing hidden from the view of anyone near the tables, peeking through a wide opening in between two books on the shelf. It was Sophia, looking very disturbed. As soon as she saw she'd been spotted, she turned and walked away quickly, disappearing to another aisle.

James, who was still holding her hand and had stopped when she did, saw her looking at the now empty aisle. "What?"

"It was Sophia," Lily said with a worried tone. She looked up at him. "I think she saw everything."

James assumed a meaningful expression for a moment and then looked back at the space where Sophia had been. Then he just squeezed Lily's hand and said, "Come on."


	11. Sympathy For The Devil

Professor McGonagall was no less than appalled to hear Madam Pince's account of what had happened in the library. Sirius was in too bad a mood to even bother giving excuses or explaining what kinds of things Snape had said to make him angry. He just stood in her office hardly saying anything and hardly listening while she scolded him. After fifteen minutes he walked out with a week's worth of detention to serve and thirty points taken from Gryffindor House, knowing that Professor Constantine wouldn't be giving Snape any kind of punishment at all. 

The others never spoke about it at all that night or the next morning, but things between him and Lily were a little unstable. She talked like everything was fine but would never look him in the eye so that he'd feel a mixture of guilt and anger at her for making him feel bad about it, all the while knowing that that wasn't really her intention.

Remus hated the feeling of embarrassment that came up in his stomach when Madelin asked him about the rumors she'd been hearing about Sirius. He knew that as Sirius's friend he should have some explanation for his actions and be able to defend him in some way, but the truth was Sirius was being a little bit of a conundrum lately.

"I don't want you to think I like Severus Snape," she said after she had brought up the subject when they were talking in the library that afternoon. "I don't know anything about him but I've heard he's not very nice."

"Understatement," Remus said with a nod.

"But is it true Sirius was trying to really hurt him when he couldn't even fight back?" she asked tentatively. "Some people who saw it said it was...

Remus's eyebrows contracted conflictedly. "The thing you have to understand about Sirius...You have to know him really well to know him at all. He isn't a very open person and without understanding him inside out, I guess he just seems very angry. But he grew up in a horrible environment. His mother, I imagine, never even hugged him except maybe when he was very young."

"That's terrible," she said, her face innocently sad.

"Yeah. Well, his family is mostly made up of people like Snape. You know, and all the Slytherins he hangs around with. So when Snape and his friends are around being...well, being the way they are, sometimes it just hits a sensitive nerve and Sirius takes everything out on him."

He knew these words very well because they were the ones he always said to himself to explain why Sirius had played the prank on Snape that night last year, almost making Remus a murderer. But something felt a little wrong about saying them out loud to Madelin, having to explain his friend's actions to her when she hardly knew him.

These very unfamiliar thoughts dissolved when he saw a sad expression come onto her face. "I don't think he likes me," she said.

Remus wasn't expecting that, and his brow rose.

"No," he said, taking her hand. "He likes you. He just has this problem with trusting people. I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't act like I completely understand it, because he's actually been acting kind of odd."

She smiled. Remus found himself smiling back just because the way she smiled made her look so nice. Her hair was braided into two long tails draping down her chest and the soft golden rays coming through the window behind him made her eyes look a little sparkly. She really could look quite pretty in the right kind of light.

Madelin glanced to the side at a step stool that was right by them for reaching books on the top shelf. Still holding his hand, she stepped onto it, making her high enough to be able to put her arms around his shoulders. Which was what she did. He hugged her back and they stood for a while with her head head resting on his shoulder. It felt very warm and comfortable.

Remus knew if he didn't kiss her now he probably wouldn't get another good chance to for a while. He probably didn't need to ask, but even so he said, "Maddie?"

She pulled back a little so she could look at his face and said, "Yes?"

He brushed a loose strand of hair out of her face. "Can I...?"

"Moony!"

Remus rolled his eyes, which made Madelin start giggling. They loosened their grips on each other, turning to see Sirius walking down the aisle toward them. The interruption was awkward, but not nearly as awkward as it would have been just a minute ago when they were in the middle of talking about him.

"How's it going?" Sirius said. "You want to see something cool? You ever seen a shrinking paperweight?"

Remus laughed as he picked Madelin up from the stool and put her back down on the floor. "No." He glanced at Madelin, who exchanged a laughing expression with him.

"Well, check this out." He reached in his bag and drew his hand out again, holding it out in front of them like he would if he wanted Madelin to give him her hand.

"So where is it?" Remus asked.

"Right there," he said, pointing into his palm.

"Is there really something that small there?" Madelin asked, peering closely at his hand.

Sirius started laughing, but not unkindly. "I'm just joking. It's right here." He reached into his bag again and took out a small glass sphere. "You know, something really must be a bad gift when it won't even make good extra packing material. I took this from my house to hold my record player in place in my suitcase, but of course it shrank to a fourth of its size on my way over."

Madelin laughed.

"Anyway," he said, "the real reason I'm here is to find Sophia. Have you seen her around?"

"No," Remus answered.

Sirius looked at Madelin, who shook her head.

"Oh well. Here, you can hold onto this for me," he said, handing the paperweight to Madelin. "If you ever need a gift for somebody you don't like."

She laughed again as he walked away, and then she looked up at Remus.

"See? He doesn't bite," he said.

* * *

Sirius had not seen Sophia ever since he had run into her yesterday in the library and was wondering if she was all right. After looking there as well as in all of the hallways and the Great Hall, he finally went outside into the courtyard and found her sitting on a bench reading a book, surrounded by other students who were playing in the snow. He didn't reach her before he saw her put the book away and start walking back inside, so he had to run to catch up with her. 

"Hey. Babe," he said, grabbing her arm to make her stop. "Wait up."

As soon as she turned around to see him he felt her hand stinging his cheek as it flew across his face.

"Ow!" he yelled, seeing several students stopping to watch them out of the corner of his eye. "What was that for?"

"How could you attack Severus like that?!" she shouted back at once. "What the hell did you think you were

Sirius looked at her for a second in complete confusion. "What...you...?"

"I was there, I saw the whole thing!"

"Okay, but what does it matter to you?"

"That's beside the point! He was completely defenseless against you! You could have really hurt him!"

"What do you care?" he asked. "I thought you hated my cousins and that whole lot. Is Snape your buddy now or something?"

She looked uncomfortable when he said that. He didn't like what he read from her expression.

"Wait...don't tell me..." he begged, searching her face for an answer.

She sighed. "Severus and I used to be friends."

"_What?"_

"But now you don't even have him," he finished.

"I have friends at home," she replied almost defensively. "It doesn't matter. I don't need him."

"Well, that's a Slytherin talking if I ever heard one," he said nastily.

"Shut up!" she said, looking like she could gladly hit him again.

"Who _are_ you?" he asked her. "You never told me you had a soft spot for greasy scumballs. Did you even hear how he was talking about Lily?"

"Yes, I did," she said. "And I think if you weren't such a blind and simple-minded git you might figure out why he would be having a go at her all the time."

"It couldn't be because she's a Muggle-born, could it?" he said sarcastically.

"Severus is a _Halfblood_!" she yelled. "Oh, you are so pathetic! You just can't accept that you might be wrong about someone. You have all these simple, black and white ways of seeing people, and if anything disproves your way of seeing things you just can't handle it. That's why you hesitated to approach me after the first time we talked, because you didn't _want _me to turn out to be something other than an ordinary Slytherin you can sort into your negative category."

"Wait a minute," he said with his voice softening a little, grabbing her arm again because she had been about to turn away. "That isn't true. This has nothing to do with me and you."

"Yes, it does," she said, pulling her arm away quickly. "Maybe you should think about it."

"Sophia! Come on!" he called after her as she walked off so fast that no one would ever guess she was trudging through deep snow in difficult heels.

He suddenly looked around and saw that he was being stared at by many wide-eyed first and second year students.

"_Piss off!_" he yelled, exploding his anger at the nearest possible victims, so that they all jerked their gazes away from his direction and went back to what they'd been doing.

* * *

"Galadriel, leave it alone," Lily said to her cat, who was very interested in the spinning Jefferson Airplane record on Sirius's turntable and kept trying to put her paw on it. 

Lily, Remus, James, and Peter were sitting near the fireplace in the common room doing homework. James, who was sitting closest to the little table that the record player sat on, picked up Galadriel from the arm of his chair and put her in his lap. "You behave," he said.

"Speaking of behaving, where's Sirius?" asked Peter. "He's not still looking around for his girlfriend, is he?"

"No, he's right there," Remus said, who had just noticed Sirius coming in through the portrait hole looking very angry and seemingly ignorant of any of his surroundings, as he almost walked right past his friends.

"All right, Padfoot?" James called to stop him.

Sirius turned very abruptly and crossed his arms on the back of the couch most of them were sitting on. He stood there for a moment like he didn't know how to start explaining his thoughts.

"What happened to you?" James asked, able to tell very quickly that something was wrong.

"Did you and Sophia talk?" Lily helped.

"Talk?" he echoed. "If you'd call it that. We had a big row."

"Why?" Peter asked.

"Because she hates me now because of what happened yesterday. Turns out she and Snivellus are old friends."

"No!" James said in disbelief.

"Yeah. Apparently he ditched her for the cooler crowd a few years ago."

"That wasn't very nice. Why does she still care what happens to him?"

"I think it's more about the principle of the thing, James," Lily said.

Sirius stared at her. She was the only one who had showed no reaction when he told them about Sophia and Snape's past relationship.

After a moment James's eyes were on her as well, and she looked a little nervous and apologetic.

"Don't tell me you knew about it," Sirius said in a dangerously quiet voice.

She sighed. "I didn't know anything for certain. I just recalled seeing them with each other a lot a long time ago."

"So why in hell wouldn't you mention this to me?" Sirius demanded in a raising voice.

Lily paused for a second, as if considering whether or not to say her real feelings. "Because I knew you would react the way you are now," she said. "And I didn't want to stop you from pursuing something with her just because of something like that."

"So you think it's better that this is the way I found out?"

"I thought if it was really an important thing to know about her then she would have told you about it by now. Maybe she should have so that you would have hesitated before almost choking Snape to death."

"Yes, in your defense! Or did you not notice?"

"In my defense? I'm more offended by you pretending that's what it's all about than by anything Snape says about me." She was starting to look very sad; nothing that she said was shouted, just said plainly and truthfully.

James turned his eyes from her to Sirius, who had fallen silent. Sirius suddenly felt a pang of guilt. If he was going to get into fights with people for saying things about Lily he could at least give her the respect of that being his real reason, instead of practically claiming that as his excuse when it was not only comments they made about her that he was so sensitive to.

"I..." Sirius stammered awkwardly, not used to saying things like this. "I'm sorry."

Lily gave a small nod. "It's okay," she said sincerely. "But...if you really want to be a good friend, then next time I have to scream at you to stop doing something like I was yesterday, please just do what I ask."

"Okay," Sirius agreed very quickly, as if he almost expected her to start crying and would say anything at the moment to stop that from happening.

But Lily breathed in quickly and regained herself, and everyone was silent for an uncomfortable moment. James broke it by suggesting, "Game of Dud, anyone?"

Everyone let out a strange mixture of a groan and a laugh, as Sirius's new board game had become a bit of a joke between the five of them because they had played it several times and found it to be completely unfair and devoid of technique or strategy. Even so, they took a break in their work to get the game out from where they always kept it under one of the tables and ended up wasting an hour on the despicable thing, though they laughed the whole way through.

Sirius was able to have fun, but still felt very confused inside. The thing that was strange to him about this fight with Sophia was that even after all he had found out about her and after they'd yelled at each other furiously, he knew that if he went much longer without getting along with her he would miss her. He wasn't happy about some of the things he had said to her and felt bad whenever he thought about the possibility that he had really hurt her. Whether it really troubled her or not, Sophia didn't have many people at Hogwarts who cared about her, and to leave her the moment she proved to be a little different than what he'd seen in her from the beginning seemed tremendously unfair.

He didn't know what he was going to do, but he was too stressed out to worry about it tonight. Maybe she would be willing to talk tomorrow.


	12. Carry That Weight

The next day Sophia was sitting at a table in the library looking over some Astronomy notes when a paper airplane suddenly flew over her head, its wings flapping magically, and landed softly on her book in front of her. She looked around, but nobody was looking her way as if they had just sent it to her; only Madelin Wood, sitting not far away, was looking up from her work because she had just noticed it flying by. She opened up the paper and looked at both sides, but it was completely blank. Then she saw letters starting to appear at the top of one side, as if written by an invisible hand. Once finished, the writing read,

"Hello, Sophia."

She felt her heart jump immediately, for she recognized the handwriting at once. She turned around again, and then she saw him: Snape was sitting at a table not far away with his back turned to her, but he had nothing in front of him but a piece of parchment he was evidently writing on, and was now sitting still as if waiting for something.

Sophia realized quickly that he must have sent her one of a pair of twin parchments. They had used these to write notes to each other all the time when they were younger. She got a quill out of her bag and wrote back a message on her parchment:

"Severus? What brings you to talk to me all of the sudden?"

The words that gradually appeared beneath it in response said, "Well, I'm not really talking to you. We're actually writing back and forth to each other."

"Don't be smart," she wrote back, a smirk spreading across her mouth.

There was a moment in which nothing appeared back for a while, and then he wrote, "But in all seriousness, I hope there's no hard feelings now about us growing apart."

"You mean about you abandoning me?" she wrote.

"People change. I simply no longer related to you and found friends I fit in with better."

"Speaking of which, I saw how quickly your new friends came to your aid in the library the other day," she wrote back before he could continue.

A moment's hesitation. "Surely you remember that I prefer to take care of myself. But it's sweet of you to be concerned. Actually, the point of this exchange is my concern for you. More specifically, about the people you're befriending. I understand you and Black have become close."

Sophia's brow narrowed as she read this, and she wrote, "What about him?"

"I know we haven't spoken in a long time, but I feel it would be very disloyal if I didn't warn you about him and that group," he wrote back. "They aren't what they seem. Lupin, especially, is not exactly the gentleman he appears to be."

"Lupin? Why does he have anything to do with this? What are you talking about?"

"You know that he is absent from school very often?"

"Oh yeah, I forgot about that. People used to talk about it like it made him some kind of weirdo."

"Nobody has ever been clever enough to piece together his secret. But if you pay attention to the days he is always gone, they are always during the full moon."

Sophia's eyes ran across this sentence, and when she was done reading it she immediately burst into a short fit of laughter, making several students look up at her like she was a lunatic. She turned in her seat and met gazes with Snape for a moment, but he wasn't laughing. She turned back to the paper.

"You're not joking," she wrote, the shock now spreading through her.

"No. I am the only one who knows about him besides his friends and the staff."

"But how did you find out?"

Once again there was an expectant pause, and then his text starting appearing again.

"I found out when I was almost attacked by Lupin last year," appeared the writing, and Sophia's eyes became wider with each sentence he wrote. "When he transforms he sneaks down a tunnel under the Whomping Willow which leads to that shack in Hogsmeade that nobody goes into. I guess all of this was built for his convenience. I went down that tunnel once and almost made it to the shack, not knowing what I would find. I could have been seriously hurt or killed if Potter didn't get down there at the last minute and stop me because he was afraid of getting in trouble."

Sophia felt like cold water was spreading through her body, all the way to the tips of her fingers, making writing feel different for her, almost difficult. "What do you mean? Why would_ he _get in trouble if Remus attacked you? How did you find your way down there in the first place?"

He took longer than ever to write his answer this time, and she turned for a second to look at his back. But then the words came in black, horribly infallible and true.

"I was tricked. Black put me up to it."

"_You're lying!_" she shouted out loud, standing up and looking straight at him. Every single head around them turned toward them with alarmed faces.

He just looked back at her calmly and said, "I'm sorry, Sophie."

Breathing heavily, she just stared at him a moment and shook her head. Then she grabbed the piece of twin parchment from the table, crumbled it into a ball and threw it at him; it hit his shoulder and fell to the floor.

_"Fuck _you, Severus," she said in a dark, low voice. 

With that, she grabbed her things and quickly walked out of the library, followed by many eyes. Snape got up from his seat and left with an almost pleased expression on his face to go to a different part of the library, acting as if nothing in the world was wrong. Some students were now laughing, but they mellowed down when they say Madam Pince coming their way to investigate the raised voices.

The only person not staring in the direction of Sophia leaving with a look of utter confusion on her face was Madelin Wood. She was looking at the discarded piece of paper Sophia had thrown at Snape that was now sitting still and forgotten on the floor, and she got up and went over to it.. As everyone distractedly conversed with each other about what could have just happened, she picked it up and put it in her pocket before anyone else could see it and also become curious.


	13. Dazed and Confused

The next day at lunch, the Gryffindor table was a gallery of unhappy faces in the middle where the five friends sat. Remus was worried and had been quiet all day, and an angry look had not left Sirius's face for a couple days. Sirius didn't like appearing sad but had no problem expressing anger. In fact, he was often very comfortable covering up sadness with anger. But even though his friends knew his emotions were often unreadable and deceiving, they had been talking quite carefully to him for a while as if he might explode.

"Remus, are you okay?" Peter asked.

"Yeah," he answered distantly. "I just...Have any of you heard if Madelin's sick or something?"

They all shook their heads except for Sirius, who had his chin rested on his upright fist and looked like he wasn't even listening.

"Why?" James asked. "Don't tell me _your_ main squeeze has gone missing now."

Remus laughed half-heartedly. "No, she's just not in classes. Well, at least she wasn't in the one I have with her in the morning. And I'd think she would have told me if...Oh, I don't know."

"While we're on main squeezes..." Peter began, turning to Sirius, but he seemed unable to summon the nerve to ask the question.

"Is Sophia still not talking to you?" Lily finished for him.

Sirius dropped his fist on the table heavily. "That bitch," he said, crossing his arms. "What do I care?"

Lily and James exchanged a knowing look and everyone else lowered their eyes nervously.

Peter suddenly looked up and pointed at a girl walking past the Gryffindor table. "Isn't that one of Madelin's friends?" he asked Remus. "Why don't you ask her where she is?"

Remus looked up and saw that Selena Sterling was indeed coming near them on her way to the end of the table. Before she passed them he called her name and she stopped.

"Oh, Remus!" she said, her eyes widening. She came up to the table and said, "I wanted to ask you: Do you have any idea what's wrong with Madelin?"

"What?" he said, concern immediately readable on his face. "No. I haven't seen her in a while. Is she okay?"

"Not at all. Last night I found her crying in her bed but she wouldn't tell me what was wrong no matter what I did. And she didn't want to go to classes this morning, begged me to tell the teachers she was sick."

"You don't have any idea why she's acting this way?" Remus asked.

Selena shook her head sadly. "Me and Clara were just about to go bring her some food and see if we can talk her into coming down for the rest of her classes."

"All right. Tell her I hope she...well, tell her I..."

She just nodded. "Right, I'll tell her something that sounds nice."

And she walked away, leaving him looking much more worried than before.

"What do you think?" James asked him.

He shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't know. This is odd."

Monty Clubber, who was sitting on Peter's left, had been distracted from his own friends' conversation and started listening to theirs. Noticing this group seemed to remind him of something, and he said, "Oh - Sirius. What the hell was that about between Snape and your girlfriend in the library yesterday? You do still go with Sophia, right?"

"What are you talking about?" Sirius asked abesently, like Monty was saying something stupidly unimportant. But then he sat up straight and said, "Wait - Snape _talked _to her?"

"Well, it sure looked that way. I'm surprised you haven't beat him up again by now, 'cause he sure seemed to be making her upset about something. Never seen her that worked up in my life."

The student sitting with Monty tapped his shoulder to tell him something, and he had been about to turn away until Sirius reached across the table and grabbed Monty's necktie, pulling him forward. "Wait a minute. Tell me exactly what you saw."

Obviously surprised that Sirius really didn't know anything about this by now, he explained, "I was just sitting in the library and saw they were writing notes to eachother. I noticed because she was laughing out loud at something, and I saw they were each writing. On that special kind of parchment, I guess, whatever it's called-"

"Twin parchment?" Sirius suggested impatiently.

"Yeah! I thought this was weird so I was watching their faces, and at first it was like they were just having a friendly conversation, but then she suddenly got angry and stood up and starting yelling at him, calling him a liar. Then she just stormed clear out of there. Nobody could make any sense of it."

Sirius slowly let Monty have his tie back and then stared forward into space, the other looking at him wide-eyed.

"This could be bad," he said.

* * *

The only class Remus had with Madelin was in the morning, so even if her friends had convinced her to get out of bed he didn't expect to see her until after school. But on the way to Professor Constantine's room for his last class of the day he recognized the back of her brown head going down a hall and ran after her. 

She was walking with sunken shoulders and with her face pointed to the floor, looking even smaller than usual. He put a hand out onto her shoulder. "Madelin?"

As soon as he said her name she tore away from him as if something hot had touched her. "Stay away from me!" she said quietly, backing away, her voice full of fear.

Remus just stood still for a moment, silenced in complete confusion. Then he started to inch back toward her. "Maddie?" he said, his voice trembling, reaching out to take her arm and stop her from backing up as she took in shaking gasps.

"Don't touch me!" she shouted, her eyes welling with tears. She was looking at him like she didn't even recognize or know him, like he was something entirely different from the person she had been dating for a few weeks. "You!...You...lied to me! You _tricked _me! You made me think you were a nice person!"

"But I don't understand….what are you-?" he began weakly.

"Oh, I get it now! Moony! _Moony!" _she shouted hysterically, and then before Remus even noticed her taking it from her pocket she shoved a crumpled-up piece of parchment into his hands and ran away, her sobs echoing down the hallway and several heads turning to watch her.

Remus looked down at the paper and slowly spread the corners apart so he could read it. He didn't have to read more than a few words that caught his eye around the middle and bottom of the page. He closed his eyes and folded it back up, starting to feel sick.

* * *

"What the hell is going on now?" James asked of the empty desk in the back of Professor Constantine's room which he knew was supposed to be occupied by Remus. 

Sirius, Lily, and Peter turned their heads and saw what he was talking about. Lily immediately looked around the classroom. "That's strange."

"Prongs, I've got a really bad feeling about this," Sirius said quietly to James. "Last hour I kept noticing Snape looking at me with this kind of sadistic satisfaction on his face. I swear I'm gonna go mad if I don't find out what he said to Sophia soon."

James braced himself. "Do you have any idea what it could have been?"

"Yeah," he said surely. "The worst I can imagine."

"You think Remus being gone has anything to do with this?" Peter asked.

Sirius just shook his head in bewilderment.

"I don't know what is so important that the four of you must be congregating in the middle of my class," said Constantine in a mellow tone. Then his eyes narrowed, and he looked like he was mouthing the word "four" to himself in confusion. "Where is Lupin?"

"I don't know," Lily said casually, "but I'm feeling really nauseous, Professor. Could I go see Madam Trice, please?"

He sighed. "If you must."

"I'll make sure she gets there all right," Sirius said, standing up and taking Lily's arm.

"You'll do no such thing," Constantine said, sharply gesturing for him to sit back down. "She's a big girl, Black, she can get there on her own."

Lily said, "But Professor, I honestly feel as if I could pass out-"

"Enough!" he said, stamping his foot a little and pointing to the door. "You lot have already wasted five minutes of my lesson time."

Without saying any more, Lily rushed out of the classroom. As Constantine started lecturing, the others looked around at each other with slightly surprised and impressed expressions. Apparently even Lily could summon up some Marauder-like cunning and deceitfulness when it was necessary. But as they started going through the motions to pretend they were participating in the lesson, their looks were replaced with anxious, worried ones.

Lily's first guess of where Remus could be was right; when she walked into the Gryffindor common room she immediately saw him sitting on the big couch in front of the fireplace, staring into the tall flames with a terrible, hopeless, defeated look on his face that frightened her.

He seemed to know that she had come in but he didn't say anything. Lily sat down next to him on the couch and stared at him. He was clutching a piece of parchment in one hand with the written side face-down.

"I don't know what we're going to do," he said very quietly.

"What?" Lily said gently. "What are you talking about?"

He looked down at his lap sadly. "Madelin. . .It. . .it's not going to happen. She. . ."

Lily put her hand on his arm. "Remus, what happened?"

Then he turned over the parchment and showed it to her, and told her everything as her eyes scanned over the words on the page.

"I guess that at least it's better this happened now instead of later," Remus managed to say weakly. "I mean, I was maybe going to tell her, eventually. . .a long time from now. I never thought about it seriously, but of course I thought about what she might think. I never _imagined_ she would. . .she would just. . ."

"But Remus, you can't just let it end like this. You've got to explain to her that-"

"No, you didn't see her! Lily, I can never talk to her again - she'll never _trust_ me again. All I am to her now is a monster."

There was a flicker of something in Lily's eyes - shock or anger, he couldn't tell what. "Remus, you're _not_ a monster. If she can't see that-"

"It's so easy for you to say that," Remus said in a calm, accepting voice. Lily would have preferred him to sound angry. "You don't even realize how incredibly, how _exceptionally_ kind and understanding you are. When you found out what I am it didn't make any difference to you in the world. And it would be nice if that was how it always worked out for people like me, but the world just isn't like that. I guess I've been spoiled by people like you and Dumbledore and my other friends, but eventually I'm going to have to get used to that."

Lily looked at him in silence, unable to think of what to say. That she couldn't find a way to refute what he had just said was frustrating and deeply upsetting.

Half an hour later James, Sirius, and Peter finally got out of their last class and ran out of Professor Constantine's classroom as fast as they could. They flew upstairs from the dungeons so quickly that they were far ahead of any other Gryffindor students by the time they got outside of the portrait hole and were the first ones to go into the common room. When they stepped inside they found Remus and Lily sitting in silence in front of the fire. Remus was leaning over with his face buried in his hands, and Lily was rubbing his back comfortingly with her face resting in her other hand.

"What's wrong?" James asked.

Lily stood up slowly and faced the three of them. "We have a problem," she said. "Snape told Sophia everything. And Remus got this from Madelin."

She handed the piece of parchment to James, who was now wide-eyed. Peter and Sirius looked over his shoulder and all six of their eyes skimmed down the paper wildly. As they all got to around the bottom, Sirius said, in a voice that was quite unlike him, "Oh no. . ." When he finally looked away his eyes were closed and his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, but he seemed more shaken up than angry.

Remus stood up and took a deep breath, like he was resurfacing from water and ready to hit the air and face reality. "What are we going to do?"

"How many people do you think Sophia has shown this to?" Peter asked.

"There's no way to know," James said dully.

"No," Sirius spoke up suddenly. "Sophia didn't just go and tell Madelin about this. Why would she do that?"

"Target your friends, get back at you?" Remus suggested, not sounding bitter about it.

But Remus forgiving the situation wasn't enough for Sirius. "Look, I know that's not what happened."

"How do you know?" Lily asked.

"Because I just don't think she would do that!" he shouted, getting angry. "It's not like her! She's never had a problem with Remus, it's _me _that hurt her."

"Yeah, but for all she knows now I was in on a sick plan to get her old friend killed," Remus said.

"Padfoot," James said in a calming voice. "We don't know what happened, but we can't let her tell anybody else. It would get all over the whole school. We're almost done with our last year and I don't want to see Remus leave because parents and students aren't okay with him being here - because I know you'd do that even if Dumbledore wouldn't make you," he added to Remus, who gave a tired smile. "We can go to Dumbledore about this and he can talk to Madelin and Sophia-"

"No, please don't do that," Remus begged in an exhausted voice. Then he sighed. "Listen, if anybody else had been told about it, we would know. Madelin isn't going to tell anyone. She hasn't even told her best friends. I think she's scared to," he added with his eyes looking down at the floor. "We should just leave her alone."

Everyone was quiet for a few seconds. Other students were starting to come into the common room, filling the room with noise. Lily finally asked, "What about Sophia?"

They all looked at Sirius, knowing what he was going to say.


	14. Since I've Been Loving You

Sophia wanted to get the book she needed for her Potions essay and get out of the library as soon as possible. Luckily, everyone was at dinner in the Great Hall right now so there were very few people in the library to stare at her or ask her about the scene she'd made in here the night before. And she knew she wouldn't run into anyone else that she really didn't want to see.

She didn't know, however, that Sirius was sitting at one of the library tables this very moment watching her. He had gotten a tip-off about where she was from Monty, who either fancied Sophia or was just an unusually observant person; Sirius wasn't sure which. He had told Sirius that he had seen her going into the library just as most of the students were leaving it to go eat dinner. Now he had been sitting there obscuring his face by pretending to read a book for five minutes.

Sophia didn't even notice him there when she came out of the aisles and walked right by his table to go to a different section of the library. But she didn't get all the way past him before he dropped the book, revealing himself, and grabbed her wrist to stop her.

"I need to talk to you," he said to her horrified face.

"You get the hell away from me," she said quietly but very dangerously, like in a growl, as she vigorously tried to pull away.

"Please. I know what happened. I just need you to listen to me for one moment."

"If you actually think you can talk me into forgiving you now, that's really sad."

"No, that isn't why I'm here. This is for _him_, not me."

That made her stop struggling, but she was still looking away toward the library doors.

"Please," Sirius said. "Sit down."

He wasn't giving her much of a choice; his hand holding her wrist was pulling her arm down until she finally sat in another chair at the table that faced his.

"So," Sophia said, "I should have known Severus would tell you what he had done so he could take credit for me never speaking to you again."

"No. I found out from someone else, actually. While you and your old mate are talking again, you can thank him for single-handedly screwing up Remus's only chances he's had with a girl as long as I've known him."

"What are you talking about?" she asked, a look of genuine confusion on her face.

"Madelin Wood. She knows."

There was a pause of silence. This was clearly news to Sophia.

"I didn't tell her anything," she said.

"She had the notes you and Snape were writing to each other."

"...Oh," she said, after thinking for a moment. "I...left it there. I wasn't thinking about it. I don't know how she ended up with that, but I _didn't_ tell her."

Sirius looked at her for a long moment. Then he said in a softer voice than he had been using before, "Yeah. I never thought you did."

She turned her eyes away from his, looking very uncomfortable for a second. "What do you want?"

He premeditated what he was going to say for a moment. When he started speaking, it was slowly and cautiously. "It is my fault that you know about Remus," he said. "And I need to have your promise that you won't tell anyone."

"And why should I promise that?" she questioned right away. The idea of spreading the truth to anyone else seemed to have become more appealing to her now that he was asking her not to do it.

"Because none of this is Remus's fault, and he wouldn't deserve that. He's never done anything to Snape. His hands are completely clean of it."

"That's not what Severus made it sound like."

"Yes, without a doubt I'm sure he dirtied up the story to make all of us look like cold-blooded killers. But the whole thing was my doing."

"Why should I even trust anything you say?"

"God dammit!" he said suddenly. "James went down there and stopped him, he _told _you that. He saved his life! Does it sound like _he _was in on it?"

"Severus said he just got scared at the last minute."

"_Scared? _Nobody even remotely scared would have gone down that tunnel knowing what he knew was there. It was lucky for Snape James even found out what I had done because he's the only one who would have been crazy enough to go help him."

"You're lying. I don't believe you," Sophia said, and then immediately her expression changed as she realized she had been shouting the same thing at Snape. Then she shook herself out of thinking about that and said, "I don't care how you want me to look at it. It's still a horrible thing you did to him, and horrible the way you and your friends have always treated him. I don't _want_ to hear how you would explain yourselves." She got up from the table and started to leave.

"No. Sophie-" He grabbed her wrist again. "Please. I'm not denying anything he said _I_ did or trying to make excuses for myself, but the others did nothing to deserve the effects of this. You just have to trust what I tell you."

She was silent for a moment, letting him hold her wrist. Then she said quietly, "I did trust you. Now I know what a big mistake that was."

She turned to pull away, but he said, "Wait," and pulled her closer to him, fighting the passionate struggle she returned. He wrapped his arms around her waist to keep her held there, leaning his face against her abdomen in a very pleading, pathetic position. This shocked her so much that her anger departed for now and she just stood there frozen in place, looking down at his head.

Sirius began, "What I did. . .It was wrong. I know." She could feel his warm breath moving the fabric of her shirt as he talked. This sudden closeness made her very uncomfortable. "It was just. . .something he'd done lately that had made me so angry. Him and my cousin. I can hardly remember it now. But it doesn't matter. It's no excuse. I've been denying my responsibility for it because it was just too horrible a thing to admit to being at fault for. I thought that if I just kept thinking that he had it coming to him, that he brought it on himself, then it would be okay. Because if it was my responsibility then that would mean I would have been at fault if anything had happened to him. For so long I've just tried not to think about that. And I do wish I had never done it, because of what it keeps costing me. I can't be rid of it. I am losing so much now because of it." As he said this his hands moved wantingly around her waist, holding her to him even tighter, seemingly without him meaning to do it. If he could see her face then, he would see the same sadness he felt then dwelling lamentingly in her eyes as she stood there almost looking like she wanted to touch him back. Something at that moment made it feel hauntingly wrong for her arms to be hanging at her sides instead of clutching his head to her and touching his hair, holding him back.

"Please," he begged finally. "I can't handle having anything else on my hands. If you just won't tell anybody, I'll do_ anything."_

She stared into the air in silence for a moment before finally saying something to that. "I just want to forget about all of this. Both of you. If you really want me to do what you ask, I want you to promise you'll never bother me with any of this again. That you'll never _speak _to me again."

He hesitated, his hold on her not loosening at all despite what he was about to agree to. "...All right."

And so they stayed this way for a few more seconds. Then Sophia swallowed and said quietly, "I felt this stupid kind of happiness when he started writing me that note. After all, he hadn't talked to me for years. It made me think of how things used to be and what he was like back then. And then to realize that he was only doing it because he saw a way to get back at you." Then she said it, the passionate mixture of different feelings that came out making it sound heartbreakingly true. "I hate you."

Sirius's grip on her became weightless, but he didn't make a sound. Now staying in this position was only serving as a good way for him to not have to look her in the face.

"How hypocritical you are," she said. "Between you and Severus, I can't even say who's worse. You and your goddamn cousins and brother, you're just like a bunch of children, being so aggressive and spiteful to each other. For all I'm concerned you lot can battle it out until you kill each other."

Then she reached her hands up to his shoulders and shoved him away from her, quickly turning her back on him before either of them could see the other's face. She started to walk away but stopped when Sirius said something, his voice unrecognizably soft and quiet.

"I didn't tell you," he said. "I didn't know how to say it, when you asked me if I'd ever felt the same way before about anybody. But I know now it had to have been more real with you, because every other girl I ever took into the Room of Requirement didn't remember it afterwards. They would remember what happened, but they'd think it had happened somewhere else."

He paused to give her a moment to say something if she didn't want to hear this, but she just stood still and silent. He went on, "We always knew the room was unplottable on maps, but I didn't expect that it would be able to make itself impossible for others to remember for my convenience. If it hadn't worked that way, I never would have brought as many people there. We couldn't have everyone I took there telling their friends and ruining the secret. But you. . .you were different. You remembered everything afterwards. I thought. . .well, maybe it doesn't make any difference to you, but I just thought you should know that."

Sophia stood there facing away from him, not moving. The nearly empty library was completely silent, and in that moment the silence was unbearable, filling the air in between them with everything they could say to each other but never would.

Then, finally, she walked away from him, both of them knowing right then that he probably could have trusted her not to tell anyone about Remus anyway. After all, she didn't have any friends at Hogwarts to tell. But it was somehow easier than breaking up with each other the normal way.

* * *

James was lying on his back across the couch in the common room, his head resting on one end and his feet up on the other. Lily was lying across him laying her head on his chest tiredly as he held her around her shoulders with one arm and used the other to hold up a book he was reading. They didn't move when Sirius came in through the portrait hole, but when James saw it was him he folded over the corner of the page he was on and set the book down on Lily's back, where it sat rising and falling as she breathed. 

Sirius came up to the couch and said in a tired voice, "Hey, mate." He stopped, looking at Lily, who was lying still with her eyes closed, and lowered his voice. "Is she asleep?"

"No," Lily murmured, but she didn't open her eyes. James smiled and brushed some of her hair out of her face.

"I have a message for you. _And _you," Sirius said, poking her head with his finger. "Professor McGonnagall wants you to meet with all the prefects tomorrow to establish some actual rules on point deduction. There have been some. . .well. . .liberal differences between prefects as far as how many points certain rule-breaking is worth."

James laughed. "Yeah, right. This is about Lily only taking ten points from me for playing on the thin ice over the lake and taking twenty from Simon Kinkaid for doing the same thing. Isn't it?"

This made Lily open her eyes and look up. "I told you! When you take off more than ten points for anything you have to turn in a written statement for it. I wasn't about to write up a note about how my stupid boyfriend, the _Head Boy,_ was setting a horrible example for the young students just because Peter thought it was _so _funny-"

Sirius started laughing very hard.

"Or, you know, you could just admit you were being biased and that me and the boys have successfully had a bad influence on you," said James with a smile.

Lily rolled her eyes and laid her head back down on his chest.

"Well, actually, I think Professor McGonnagal still doesn't know about that," Sirius said. "Nobody would tell on you guys. They love that you're Head Boy, at least, because _you _don't tell on them for anything," he added to James, who laughed.

James sat up enough to look around the room. There were a couple other students studying quietly in corners. James had to be discreet about what he was about to ask.

"So, uh. . .Is anybody going to be telling on Remus?" he asked him seriously, his joking mood toned down, but without sounding too suspicious.

Sirius's face changed in a way that made it clear that when he had been laughing before, it had not really reflected how he was feeling. He was truly the best actor James knew.

"I took care of it," he said. Despite the deceptively casual way he said it, James could see just from looking at him that he was in a lot of pain. And without even having to ask, he knew that everything between him and Sophia was over.

He gave Sirius a very sorry look, and Sirius just shook his head. He turned and walked away to go up to the dormitories.

James picked up his book and threw it on the ground. Wrapping both arms snugly around Lily, he said in a quiet voice only she could hear, "Great. Now we can be thoroughly depressed."

She smirked unhappily. "It really makes me sad. I don't know what to think of this whole thing. Sirius and Remus are good people, they're both worth loving. But in reality, what kind of relationships would they have been in after a while without Madelin and Sophia knowing these things they found out? I mean, they'd just _have_ to know."

"But they both found out in the completely wrong way. What if it could have been in different circumstances?"

Lily was quiet, thinking about this for a moment. Then she said, "I don't know. I can't really be the voice of experience with this; you're the only person I've ever been serious with. But maybe two people can have certain differences that just cannot be overcome. Sirius has a limited point of view because of the way he grew up, and maybe Sophia does too, which could make it impossible for them to ever understand each other and for her to forgive him for some of the things he's done. Maybe it's possible for two people to just be incapable of seeing eye to eye on some really important things. You know...even if they really love each other."

Those words caught James's curiosity. "Do you really think that they...that she...?"

"Did you not see how your best friend looked when he just walked through here? I think it was pretty serious, yes."

"But they had already been having problems, hadn't they? For all we know it was already as good as over between them. Maybe Sirius is just feeling the unpleasant pang of closure."

She looked troubled. "No...I don't think so. If it was already over at that point, then why would Sophia have been so upset to find out what Snape told her?"

James hadn't thought about that. Changing the subject to voice something that was bothering him, he said, "But Madelin...I don't get it. Doesn't she know after dating Remus that whole time that he's a good guy? It doesn't make any sense to me. In fact, it makes me kind of mad."

"I don't understand it either," Lily said. "I suppose he _did _lie to her. She has every right to feel deceived. How can she know how much of what she thought she knew about him was a lie?"

"He didn't have any choice-!"

"Yes, I know, of course I'm not blaming him. It kind of makes me mad, too."

James's eyebrows raised. "It does?"

"Yes. It's not fair and it's not right. But I think there was something more to it. She spent lots of time with Remus; she knew him. Now she is so terrified of him that she won't even tell her friends anything? That just seems like blind and irrational fear. Something's not right about it."

She started to feel tired again and closed her eyes. James felt her breathing slow down to a relaxed pace again. He did not pick up his book to read again, but just rubbed Lily's back slowly and stared into the fire. At one point he heard the portrait hole slide open and did not look up to see who had come in. But he didn't have to, for a moment later someone started to play a soft song on the piano in the opposite corner of the room. The sound immediately took James back to when Remus used to play all the time. But something about his playing was different now. It sounded like it was expressing something that couldn't be put into words, rather than replacing Remus's words that he was too quiet and reclusive to speak. And it sounded very sad.


	15. In My Time of Dying

A couple more quiet, doleful days went by and Sirius, James, Peter, Remus, and Lily submerged themselves in their studies, spending most of their time doing schoolwork in the library or common room and saying nothing more about the recent events that had affected them. But something was to happen that would take their minds off of those things for quite a while, though not in a way they would have chosen.

Lily was woken up one night by some voices talking in her dormitory. As her eyes gradually fluttered open she could see from the very faint light coming through the window that the sun had only just started to rise; it was still more dark than it was light outside.

As she looked across the room she saw that Professor McGonnagal was by Sarah Locket's bed and speaking to her with a very grave look on her face, which Lily could see clearly in the light coming from her wand. She looked at the clock on the table by her bed. What did Professor McGonnagal need to tell Sarah at 5:00 in the morning?

"I don't understand, Professor," Lily heard Sarah saying in a worried voice. "What happened at the office? Are my parents okay?"

"Perhaps you better come into the common room with me, Miss Locket," said McGonnagal. Something about the way her voice sounded gave Lily a horrible chill down her back. "Then I can talk to you without disturbing these other girls."

But that was apparently not a valid concern; as soon as Professor McGonnagal left with her arm around Sarah's shoulders, Lily saw that either her talking or the light from her wand had made both of the other girls in the dormitory wake up. Yvette Doisneau sat up in her bed and looked over at Lily questioningly, just as Tanya Korsakoff was rubbing her eyes and murmuring, "What's going on?"

But the answer came almost immediately when they all heard Sarah start to sob outside the door.

"_No!..._Oh, _please, _no..."

Yvette took a sharp inhale of breath and covered her mouth with her hand. Lily just sat very still, feeling as if she would never be able to move again, like time was standing still and trapping her in a sudden nightmare. The moment seemed to stretch on and on for a very long time, something that all of the girls in that room were going to remember clearly for the rest of their lives.

* * *

News at Hogwarts traveled fast even among a sleeping student body; by 5:45 nearly everyone had been woken up and told about what had happened. Before it was even time for breakfast to be served in the Great Hall, about fifty students were awake, some dressed, and congregated in the Gryffindor common room. 

Still in the T-shirt and flannel pants he slept in, James shoved his way through clusters of people all over the room until he finally spotted the face he was looking for. Lily was sitting alone in an armchair, her hands clasped very tightly together, looking tense and shaking a little as if she was freezing in the cold, though the common room was quite warm. James dropped into a kneel in front of the chair and took her hands in his right away.

"Oh, James," she said, leaning forward in the chair to be closer to him. "Sarah...Sarah's parents were both there..."

"I know," he said softly. "Yvette told me. And Simon and Cynthia's dad-"

"Oh no!" she interrupted him. "I forgot about the Kinkaids! Their father is an Auror, too."

He looked at her sadly. "He was."

Lily's eyes became watery for a second. "Where are the others?"

"They went back up to the room to get dressed. I wanted to find you."

She squeezed his hands tightly. "You go get dressed, then, and I'll wait for all of you. I want to get out of this room."

He nodded and stood up, taking her face in between his hands and kissing her before leaving.

The four boys and Lily went down into the Great Hall early but found that they were far from the only people who had had the same idea. The first thing they noticed was that the Hall had been hung with flags like it usually was at the last feast of every school year, but instead of displaying the House colors of whoever had won the House Cup, the flags were solid black for mourning. They met with many others from Houses outside of theirs, who gave them terrible news of more students who had lost friends and family members overnight. When owls finally started flying into the Hall carrying copies of the _Daily Prophet, _there was a mad rush of students running toward anywhere they saw one land in the hopes that they could glimpse some words over the reader's shoulder. The front page article had been written and printed at just the last minute to make this morning's paper. Enormous text covering almost half of the front page read "DEATH EATERS' DARK LORD REVEALED! DEVASTATION STRIKES!"

Within minutes, everyone knew the whole story. The Aurors department in London had been attacked around 11:00 the night before. Almost a hundred employees who had been in the building had been killed. Because of the restless efforts to find and capture Death Eaters, the Department of Dark Wizard Management had become much busier than usual, crawling with Aurors and assistants at practically every hour of the day.

Other Ministry establishments had been attacked before, but this time it had been very different. All of those attacks had been done later in the night when almost nobody was in the buildings and no one was around to see anything. Very few people had died and the attacks had seemed to be nothing but an attempt to get attention. But this time the building had been left completely as it was before. The only difference was that every person was left lying on the floor dead without any apparent wounds or signs of even putting up a fight before dying, and the gigantic Death Eaters' symbol had been left in the sky above the building, accompanied by a message written in glowing words beneath it: "I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. YOU WILL NOW LEARN TO FEAR MY NAME."

"It says they talked to some Muggles who had been near the building and witnessed something strange going on," Frank Longbottom was saying to his friends, looking at his paper. "They heard screaming coming from what they thought was an abandoned old apartment building. Then they started seeing flashing green light coming from the windows. They just kept seeing this blinding green light flash again and again and again...You see, he killed all of them, on his own, this Voldemort-" Frank became very uneasy for a moment as he said it. "It was an entire building full of _Aurors. _People who know how to defend themselves against Dark magic, Wizards who are supposed to know how to deal with people like this! But it's like there wasn't even a fight, just a slaughter."

"Frank, would you stop going off about this?" his friend Polly Prewett said beside him uncomfortably. "All I can think about is Cynthia and Simon up in the hospital wing right now knowing their dad is dead because of this scene you're describing really vividly for all us. It's making my stomach turn."

"Sorry, Alice," he said remorsefully. "I'm just...so shocked, is all."

"Did you hear about Katrina Crane?" Alice Nightingale asked the two of them. "She had an aunt who was a secretary there. And a friend of Louis Zimmerman's family was an Auror there, too."

As they sat overhearing all of this, the boys and Lily could not manage to say anything. Lily was leaning her head on James's shoulder tiredly and kept breathing shakily as if she was crying, though no tears were actually coming out. Peter was staring down at the tabletop with a fearful expression and every once in a while would look around at all of his friends as if he wasn't sure how to react to all of this and was waiting for a cue from one of them that would tell him how to act. Nobody could see Remus's face because he had his head down on the table resting over his arms and his face was turned away from everyone. Sirius was just leaning forward with his elbows on the table and one of his hands covering his mouth, a vacant sadness and disbelief in his eyes.

"Hey, look at this," said Alice, who had taken Frank's paper to look at it herself. "There's a shorter article later on in the paper that talks about what the Ministry is doing to handle all this. Listen: 'As soon as is possible today, the Minister and the most important Ministry officials will be meeting with Richard Karlstein as well as all the other remaining Aurors and Albus Dumbledore to discuss a resistance against Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters that must be formed. News coverage of these plans will be limited in order to protect information about the organization from servants of Voldemort. Anyone who is interested in and capable of volunteering their efforts in the resistance may visit the new Ministry headquarters which are still under construction in London.'"

"New headquarters?" Alice echoed.

"Yeah, they're building a new Ministry in a bigger place that will have all of the different departments in it," said Frank. "It's supposed to be better protected and a lot less vulnerable to attacks like this."

"But where?"

"I heard from the Kinkaids a while ago that it's being built above a place the Ministry has had underground for hundreds of years. These days it's called the Department of Mysteries."

"How can you be joking like that at a time like this?" Polly said, appalled. "The Department of Mysteries is just some dumb story you read about in _The Quibbler."_

"No, it isn't," Alice said seriously. "My mum's best friend is a sister of one of the Unspeakables - the people who work there. It's true. Nobody really knows what goes on down there because the Unspeakables can't talk about it."

"The most anybody knows is that they conduct rather dodgy experiments and studies down there," Frank said. "I've heard that's where the Time Turner was developed, as well as some extremely dangerous magical objects that nobody even knows about, completely by accident."

"Well, if the Unspeakables can't talk about what it is they do there, then where did these rumors come from?" Polly asked skeptically. Frank went silent.

"Just look at them," Sirius said suddenly, surprising them all. They followed his gaze over to the Slytherin table, which at the moment mostly consisted of small groups of students huddled around newspapers looking genuinely fascinated as they read the cover article. Some of them were whispering very covertly to each other, and some especially bold and proud ones like Bellatrix Black were not even making an attempt to hide how they really felt about this incident. She and Rodolphus Lestrange were talking animatedly as if it were a normal morning.

Lily turned back around and shook her head. "Never mind them," she said bitterly.

But Sirius kept looking over in that direction for a moment, and he privately noted that Sophia was not there. He certainly didn't blame her for not wanting to sit with the Slytherins today.

The group noticed Professor Marlewe approaching the back of the Hall where the teachers ate. He clapped his hands twice and called, "May I have your attention, students?"

The talking died down to a low buzz as the student looked up toward him.

"May I first offer my condolences to all who this tragedy has hurt," he said. "As you may have been told already by your Head of House, there will be no classes today. Professor Dumbledore has left the school to meet with members of the Ministry in London. He has left instructions that no students are to leave the school for now. Please stay only in supervised areas of the castle. Dumbledore wanted me to tell you not to be alarmed by these precautions he recommended we take; Hogwarts is much more safe than most other places you all could be right now, and it is quite protected from an attack like the one on the Aurors office that happened last night. However, until it is clear that last night was not just the beginning in a series of attacks one after another, your parents will probably feel better knowing that extra efforts are being made to keep you all safe. It is recommended you write to your families and tell them of the situation here. Please pass this information onto your friends who aren't here. Thank you."

As he left the platform, Lily looked at her friends with a realization. "My parents won't hear anything about this. I better go write to them right away."

James nodded and turned to kiss her, but she pulled back as he leaned forward. "Oh, you better not. I've been feeling a little sick since last night. Don't want to give you anything."

"Alright. Maybe you should go back to sleep."

She shook her head. "Do you really think I could sleep?"

He shrugged and gave her a look that said, _I suppose not, _and she got up and walked away. A moment later Sirius noticed there was something white on the seat where she'd been sitting, and leaned forward to look at it. "She left her sweater."

James looked down at the seat next to him, picked it up, and looked toward the Great Hall entrance, but Lily was already gone. He folded it up neatly and put it in his book bag to give back to her later.

They were all silent again until James let out a long sigh and said, "I guess life after school isn't going to be exactly how we thought."


	16. What Is and What Should Never Be

The school was unusually quiet all of that day, but every second of silence was punctured with all of the things no one was saying but everyone was wondering in their heads. The entire wizarding world was suddenly aware that it was facing a great enemy, but almost nothing about this enemy was known. Somehow that made him much more frightening. People everywhere were starting to shudder merely at the mention of the Dark Lord.

Five students who had lost parents or other family members that day went home to their families. When James and Lily were sitting in front of the fireplace in the common room that afternoon, they saw Cynthia Kinkaid come down from her dormitory and hug all of her friends goodbye. Up until they saw that, it had been easy to just not think about what was happening, but after Cynthia left the room Lily was close to tears and James had to hold her a long time until she was okay again. James wished they could go out for a walk, or maybe even a fly on his broomstick, for it probably would have helped them both feel a little better. Being stuck inside where someone in every room was still talking about the massacre and the air was thick with grief and shock didn't help their moods much, especially since classes weren't in session and there was nothing better to do but keep talking about it. But for good reasons, all students had to stay off the grounds, so instead he walked her down to the owlery so she could send the letter she had written to her family.

After dinnertime Remus, Sirius, and Peter had started to get just as restless, so all five of them went to the library to work on the few assignments they had to do. Wanting to stay as far away from all the talk about inevitable war as they could, they occupied the two couches on each side of a small table that were in between two aisles near the front of the library, far away from the study tables where many other students were gathered. Sirius and Lily were both finished with all of their schoolwork and disappeared to other parts of the library looking for something to read while the others studied.

When Lily hadn't come back after fifteen minutes and James was too bored with his ridiculously simple Herbology homework, he went looking for her and found her sitting on a stepping stool in the Muggle Studies section reading a book. She looked at him with a feeble smile as he approached, and he glanced down at what she was reading, seeing a picture of a fierce-looking man with a toothbrush mustache with his arm raised in the air to a large army of uniformed people in the same position.

"What are you reading?" he asked her.

She looked like she didn't want to admit it, but then closed it to show him the title on the cover: _A Complete History of Muggle Warfare._

"I just wanted to remind myself of how foolish and pointless so many of _their _wars have been," she said. "Not to mention how many they've gotten into."

"Why?" James asked.

"Because...we're kind of lucky. It's horrible that the wizarding world is going to be at war, but at least this is the only one in our recent history. And at least in our situation, many people who may be lost will at least be fighting for a good cause. Nobody will die for ridiculous reasons like some Muggles have in wars."

James kneeled in front of her. "Are you scared people you know are going to die?"

"Of course I am, but that's not all I'm thinking about." She paused, possibly wondering how much she should say at this point in time. "There really aren't that many Aurors, you know. And lots of them just died. I was thinking about how much the wizarding world will need a lot of help. And how - well - it would just definitely be worth it."

And she left it at that, letting James think about it. She stood up and put the book back on the shelf. Then she took James's hand and said, "I'm still not feeling well. I think I'm going to go upstairs and rest."

"Maybe you better go to the hospital wing," he suggested.

"No, it's nothing serious. My head just feels like a balloon. I'm going to get to bed."

With a squeeze of his hand, she turned and left. When James went back to the group, Sirius was lying across one of the couches reading something he'd found in the fiction section, but he didn't look very entertained by it. William Bell walked by them and he and James exchanged somber nods of ackowledgement. William stopped when Noriko Takanashi ran up to him from his right.

"Hey, Will," she said breathlessly. "When are you going to help me train that friend of mine for Quidditch?"

"Riko, it's _winter_," he said simply.

"So? It isn't too cold."

"What's her name again? What position is she trying out for next year?"

"Eliza. She's thinking about taking _his _place," she said, pointing to James. "As Seeker."

Will looked behind him at James and gave a small laugh. "Well. No one can really take _his _place. But since I won't be around, what do I care?"

"Why don't you have her learn from the master?" James asked. "I could give her some tips."

"Would you really?" she asked in surprise. "Will was only going to help out because I've been helping him with his homework."

"Well, I have a little more House pride than Will and would like Gryffindor to keep kicking arse even after I'm gone."

Will lifted up the book he was carrying as if he was going to hit James with it. He flinched away from him for a second and laughed.

Noriko giggled and then said, "Hey, why don't I go get her and introduce you guys?"

James shrugged. "I've got nothing better to do. Heck, I bet I've got an old nicked Snitch hidden somewhere in my dresser. We could practice today in the hallways, even if we can't go anywhere."

Noriko was starting to look excited. Then she frowned. "Oh. But my friends are all studying, and Fifth Years and under aren't supposed to go anywhere by themselves right now."

"Even in the castle halls?" Remus asked. "I didn't hear that."

"I know, isn't it stupid?"

James heard slow breathing, and noticed Sirius seemed to be dozing off in the couch with the open book lying on his chest. A girlish yelp from Noriko's mouth brought his attention back to her; Frank Longbottom had just walked by and tickled her in the ribs.

"_Be quiet!" _Madam Pince hissed from her desk at the front. Frank giggled. Sirius stayed sound asleep.

"_Fraaaank_, walk me up to the common room," Noriko said in a pouting tone as he started walking back away.

"No way," he said. "I just got here."

"I could walk you up there," Peter offered. "I need to get something out of my room anyway."

"Oh, great! Thanks!" Noriko said, and he got up and left with her.

Will turned to James once they were gone. "Well, aren't you the nice little tutor?"

He shrugged. "Anything to get my mind off of all this."

Will's face turned serious. "Yeah. I know. You know I have a cousin who works in that building? She went home last night just an hour before the attack."

"Jesus."

"Yeah. She had really good friends who got killed there and actually feels kind of guilty about leaving them. Despite what everything looked like in there, she still feels like there's something she could have done if she had been there."

"Well," James said, "I can understand that. No matter how bad things looked and how small my chances were of surviving, I guess I couldn't leave my friends to die. It would just seem better to go with them than go on without them because I got lucky."

"But it's not like she knew what was coming."

"Right. But...just being philosophical here..."

Will laughed.

And just then the long, high-pitched scream of a girl split the quiet air; Sirius snapped awake, sitting up alertly with such sudden force that he rolled off the couch onto the floor with a loud thump. It was similar to a sound they had heard a moment before, only it wasn't the playful scream of someone getting tickled by her friend, but a desperate, terrified, blood-freezing scream.

The boys sat there frozen for a moment with their eyes wide, along with everyone else in the library. Then Will said, "I think that was Noriko."  
Remus said, "It came from the hall-"

They were up from their seats and running to the door before everyone else, the first people out of the library entrance. Remus was in front, the only one out in the hall in time to see Peter running away around a corner in the opposite direction of where one would go to get upstairs to the common room.

"Peter?" he called, but everyone else was already running the other way, and he followed.

They turned a corner at the end of the hall. And froze.

"Oh my God," Sirius said quietly, his voice dark and serious.

Suspended in the air high at the top of the corridor was a glowing green skull with a snake coiled through one of its eye sockets and coming out of its mouth. A symbol of nightmarish evil which they had seen in pictures in the paper, but never this large and close and blindingly bright, and never this frighteningly real. The Dark Mark.

Noriko was standing right underneath it completely still, and they heard her let out a soft moan. Will ran up to her just in time to catch her from falling as she fainted.

As other students who had come out of the library to see what was going on came around the corner and saw it, the hall gradually erupted with screams and panicked speech. Then, before anyone noticed she had made it out of the library among the chaotic stampede of children, Madam Pince shouted above everyone else's voices, "_Be quiet!"_

Everyone looked behind them at her, almost going completely silent.

"Everyone go down the southeast stairway and get out of the castle as fast as you can. Stay together and go down to the lake - do _not _leave the group no matter what. Go, _now!"_

Students ran down the hall to the southeast end in seconds and were soon flooding the stairway trying to get down to the first floor. Madam Pince vanished down the hall in the opposite direction, obviously going to warn the teachers. Sirius, James, and Remus were the only ones who didn't move.

"Hey! You blokes _crazy?" _Will called, looking back at them as he started down the stairs carrying Noriko.

Someone urgently yelled_, "Will!"_ and then Yvette appeared out of the crowd and pulled him away.

"Where's Wormtail?" Sirius asked first. "And Lily?"

"Oh no," James said. "She went up to bed! She won't know!"

Sirius's eyes widened. He looked at Remus, as if for an idea, but he didn't seem to have any.

"Madam Pince told us to stay with those other kids for a reason," Remus said. "I'm sure they have ways of making sure every student gets out safely...she won't just get left there..."

"Moony, do you really think that this school is _prepared _for something like this?!" Sirius said. "Never got around to practicing what we'd do in the circumstance of a Death Eater attack, did we? Professor Dumbledore isn't even here! The whole castle is going to be a chaotic circus of panicking people within five minutes, no doubt!"

"Okay," James sighed, catching his breath and trying to think clearly. He put his hand on Remus's shoulder. "Moony. Find Peter. He can't have gotten far. Find him and get out of here. Sirius and I will get Lily."

Remus opened his mouth to try to say something about what he had seen...How he was quite sure Peter was already gone and it was pointless. "But you two...and Lily...I can't-"

"Remus, there's no time. Don't worry about us. None of the staff knows how to get around this school as well as we do, much less some dumb Death Eaters. We'll be fine."

Remus seemed to be summoning some strength from somewhere deep inside of him for a moment, and then he nodded. Sirius and James watched him leave down the stairs and then rushed to the stairway at the other end of the hall that would take them up to the Gryffindor Tower.

* * *

Not to their surprise, the common room was completely deserted. Even if word about the danger they were in had not traveled up here already, practically no one was ever up here at this hour of the day. James walked over to the dormitory stairs and sighed. 

"Dammit," he said, standing looking at the steps. "Got any ideas?"

He heard no answer from Sirius, but felt something brush past his leg. A black dog passed him from behind and went right up the stairs. James gave a dry laugh, thinking that it figured that Sirius, of anybody, would have figured out from experience that the spell that kept boys from going up those stairs did not work on male animals.

James waited for a minute, getting a bad feeling when he didn't hear any footsteps accompanying the padding of Sirius's paws on the steps as he came back down. He changed as he descended quickly down the stairs, his still-tranforming legs tripping clumsily on the last step. "She isn't up there," he said.

Then James heard a meowing and looked behind Sirius at the steps to see Galadriel following him down.

"If someone told her what was going on and she was going to get out of here, she would have brought her cat," James said hollowly, looking down at the animal with his hopes diminishing.

"You sure? Your really think it's likely the Death Eaters want to torch the place or something?" Sirius asked.

James exhaled heavily in a sigh of frustration, walking over to Galadriel and picking her up. "I don't know, Padfoot. Come on."

When he turned back around he saw Sirius was closing up his record player.

"What in the bloody hell are you doing?" he asked in disbelief.

Sirius looked up guiltily. "If you really think they would destroy the castle-"

_"Come on!"_

After leaving the room, they snuck around all of the nearby areas that Lily might be if she was just now leaving Gryffindor Tower, trying to be cautious, fast, and almost silent at the same time.

"Why would she go to bed so early anyway?" Sirius asked just above a whisper.

"She's been feeling sick," James said.

"Well, a hell of a time to get sick. But doesn't this seem weird? It always seemed like the Dark Mark is something they leave _after _they attack someplace. And if they like making a big show so much, then where are they?"

How Sirius could be wondering about these things at such an urgent time only baffled James, who was worrying about nothing but getting Lily away from those people she probably didn't even know were in the castle and regrouping with their other friends to be sure they were all safe. He looked back and forth at the eerily silent corridor they were in and hit the wall with his fist. Galadriel, who had already been acting anxious like she knew something was wrong, got startled and started trying to claw her way out of his arms.

"I don't know, but all we're doing is wasting time." He bent over to set the cat on the ground and crossed his arms, thinking. And Sirius seemed to know just what he was thinking.

"We'd be safer if we could hear better, and run faster," he said.

James thought about it carefully. "Yeah, but how do we know if we hear somebody that it's her?"

"You git," Sirius said. "What do Muggles use dogs for?"

James's face was blank. "Guiding blind people?"

He rolled his eyes. "_Hunting. _Listen - do you have anything with you that would smell like Lily?"

James didn't immediately understand the purpose of the question, and looked at him in a way that made Sirius realize just what a strange thing to ask that was. "Excuse me?"

Sirius's eyes rolled again. "With a dog's sense of smell I can probably track down anybody in this castle in ten minutes, but it's no use if I don't know what I'm sniffing for."

James sighed. "Well, what can we - Wait."

Suddenly remembering something, he opened up his bookbag and took out the sweater Lily had left at the table that morning. He had completely forgotten to give it back to her.

Sirius took it and said, "Ah, brilliant!"

Galadriel caught their attention with a high-pitched mew. Sirius looked down at her and said regretfully, "Best of luck, babe. Can't take you with us any further."

* * *

Remus was mentally beating himself up for not opening his mouth and telling James and Sirius the truth. He'd known what he really should do - and what he _wanted _to do - was help them go find Lily. For he knew, deep down in his gut, that there was no reason to worry about Peter. But somehow he couldn't bring himself to tell them what he had seen, or what it might mean, for even suggesting it if it wasn't what it looked like would have been terrible. 

Peter, running away from the Dark Mark as fast as he could, leaving a Fifth Year girl defenseless and all by herself when the Death Eater that conjured it could quite possibly be hiding right around a corner. Not stopping to alert anybody.

_Leaving us, his friends. SAVING HIS OWN SKIN._

Remus blinked and shook the thought out of his head. He followed the other students from the library down the stairs, his heart pounding, feeling like he was drifting somewhere far outside of what was going on and not actually moving with his body. Find Peter. That's what he was supposed to be doing instead of leaving. What if Peter had been going to use the toilet before he went up to Gryffindor Tower?

_Running away from Noriko after she had screamed. Everyone heard it._

_Wormtail..._

When the group reached the bottom floor, Professor Phlox was passing by the bottom of the stairs carrying some plant pots. He stopped and stared when she saw all the students rushing for the doors, and Will broke apart from the group and ran toward her. Remus saw him start explaining everything to him, and then there was a crash as he dropped all of the pots and they splattered into a hundred pieces of ceramic. Looking so shocked that his hair seemed to nearly be standing up, he touched Will's shoulder, saying something brief, and then ran off.

Will rejoined the group and yelled, "Keep going, everyone! Don't worry. Everyone will know in a few minutes."

Something nagged Remus in the back of his mind. If the Death Eaters had any intelligence and wanted to infiltrate and attack an enormous school, wouldn't they not start by leaving their mark in several places all over the castle, practically as a warning for everyone to get out?

Not if they were confident enough to think it wouldn't make any difference in the outcome of the attack. And not if they had good reason to be confident.

Remus shivered, thinking of the name "Voldemort." Hogwarts, in many ways, was an even more important place to go after than the Ministry office where the Aurors were. Probably important enough for their leader himself to show up. And if the way the massacre last night had happened was a good indication of how powerful he was, they probably weren't much safer outside than they would be in the castle with no warning.

Everyone hugged their arms around themselves once they got outside. The winter night was freezing cold, and the snow seeped right through their shoes and soaked the bottoms of their robes, making their clothes heavy to run in. Will had practically appointed himself to be in charge of the forty-odd kids there since there were no adults with them and he was one of the only Seventh Years; He was running ahead of everyone else hand-in-hand with Yvette and guiding them toward the lake. Noriko had regained consciousness and was running in between Frank and Alice Nightingale. Remus ran the slowest, falling behind at the rear, glancing behind him at the castle constantly and fearing that he would see smoke coming out of one of the windows any moment, or even worse, a flash of green light.

When all of the students finally stopped within thirty feet of the glassy frozen surface of the lake, Remus looked around at all of the parts of the grounds he could see, looking for movement. Where would Peter have gone? Maybe into the tunnel under the Whomping Willow. He would be safe down there.

He would be safe, though his friends might be dead for all he would know.

* * *

"Hello?" 

Lily's voice echoed down the empty hallway. There was not a single sound to be heard; it was as if she was the only person left in the entire castle. She kept hoping to hear the murmuring of someone's voice from inside a room or some footsteps from the stairs, but there was nothing but the very distant, barely audible whisper of the wind outside hitting the windows in classrooms. She had never been in Hogwarts before when it was so quiet she could notice sounds like that.

She had been in bed, curled up under several warm, heavy layers of blankets and very near to drifting off to sleep when she heard some elevated voices from down in the common room, very briefly. The speakers had sounded a little scared, but she had thought nothing of it, and a second later it was so silent in Gryffindor Tower she was sure everyone was gone. Then, only two minutes later, quick and heavy footsteps were coming up to the girls' dormitories, the door to Lily's room opened, and Tanya Korsakoff crashed into the room, her breath coming out in pants like she had run the whole way there. Lily had opened her eyes in time to see her pick up her rat and quickly coax it into the pocket of her robes before running back towards the door. She clearly hadn't noticed Lily lying there in the dark; by the time Lily started to sit up in bed it was only to see her back leaving through the door. When Lily got out of bed and called for her down the hall she was already long gone. She put her slippers on and went down to the common room and out of the portrait hole to look around and see if she could make any sense of what Tanya had just done. She turned around, figuring she could ask the Fat Lady which direction she had just gone, and that was when she noticed.

The Fat Lady wasn't there. The people from all of the portraits on the wall were gone, only their inanimate backgrounds remaining in the painting frames.

Lily's breath hitched in a small, inhaling gasp, and she wrang her hands together nervously.

"Tanya?" she called, not expecting an answer. "Anyone? Is anybody here?"

Silence.

Lily looked back at the painting where the Fat Lady should have been, wishing she had grabbed her wand before she left the dormitories. With nobody to give the password to, she couldn't get back into Gryffindor Tower.

And that left her with nowhere to go but away from it.

So now she had been wandering around the third and fourth floor for five minutes looking for any sign of life or indication of what was happening, calling out every once in a while, but nobody answered. As the minutes went by and it became clear she seemed to have been left completely alone, she started to realize more and more that she could be in great danger, and she started running instead of walking. Her loose and bulky slippers made it hard to go very fast, so eventually she kicked them off and went on barefoot.

As if the castle was somehow aware that something serious was going on, the stairs were staying put and not changing. Although this helped Lily get down the floors faster, it was so unusual that it made her wonder even more what could be happening and made her feel much more uneasy. She finally got down to the second floor, where she had been with her friends half an hour ago. The tall double doors of the library were hanging wide open, and she could see there was absolutely no one inside.

Lily hugged her arms around herself. Her heart was starting to pound in her chest. She didn't know if she felt safe calling for anyone now. Whatever the reason was that everyone had completely evacuated the school this fast, she couldn't imagine it was something good.

As she passed the library entrance, something at the end of the hall caught her attention: the floor there was reflecting some kind of soft green light. The glow looked like it was coming from something she couldn't see around the right corner.

Taking a long, deep breath, Lily prepared herself for whatever she might see and slowly stepped over to the wall on her right. Trying to be completely silent, she cautiously crept toward the corner, staying shrunk against the wall, thinking to herself that she would just take a quick peek for one second, just to be safe.

But when she got to the end of the wall and looked, she found she couldn't move. Her first thought hit her right in the face like the Dark Mark's bright light hurting her eyes: _Oh no. Everyone is dead. Everyone is dead! _Before she could realize the irrationality of that even in these circumstances, something she heard brought more horrifying thoughts into her head.

It was very short and quiet, but she heard it coming from her left: someone laughing. She looked away from the Dark Mark and down the other end of the hall - There were dozens of suits of armor standing along the walls on each side, but she couldn't see anyone there. But Lily hadn't learned nothing from seven years of magic school; seeing nothing didn't mean anything.

Commanding her legs to move on the count of three, she waited just one moment before darting back towards the library to go back down the stairs she'd come from. Then, the strangest and most unexpected sound made her slow down and then stop. She knew that sound.

It was the galloping of hooves. She remembered the night in the dark tunnel when she'd followed her friends down under the Whomping Willow. And miraculously, even at a time like this, a kind of warmth spread through her at the thought of that memory and the smallest smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

The large black dog appeared first around the corner she'd been running toward, leading the way with something white in his mouth. The stag came up behind it, looking gigantic and powerful running on the stone floor inside the building. Lily ran toward Prongs as he stopped and her first instinct was to wrap her arms around his huge neck even though trying to hug a large animal like that didn't work very well. At once she felt the tight muscles loosening and shrinking, but she told him, "No! Don't change back!"

She walked around to his side and he seemed to know right away what she was thinking, and bent forward a little so she could more easily lift one of her legs over his back. Seeing her start to do this, Sirius barked loudly, and in that one bark Lily could practically hear his voice saying, "Are you bloody _joking?!"_

But they had few other options. Lily was almost sure there was at least one Death Eater near enough to them to know they were there, and if they could get away from there any faster than they would running on their six human feet, she was willing to do something as strange as riding on James's back.

She knew she would never be able to stay sitting up with nothing like reins to hold onto, so after she was on him and he stood up to his full height, she wrapped her arms around his lower neck and hooked her legs tightly around his torso. Then James started running and leaping down the stairs, and Lily closed her eyes and hoped she could keep holding on, seeing Sirius beside them right before she did.

* * *

What looked like the entire student body and all of the staff had now run outside and were congregated in a loud mob by the lake. It was Professor Fangora who made the first attempt to bring order, holding her wand to her throat to amplify her voice and yelling, "Everyone calm down and be quiet! You must separate into your Houses so your Heads can make a count of everyone here. Slytherin there, Ravenclaw there, Gryffindor by that tree, Hufflepuff right over here next to me. Look around and see if you know of anyone missing. Go on!" 

Remus was almost knocked off his feet as several people pushed past him trying to hustle over to where the children from their Houses were supposed to go. He made his way through the crowd to the group of Gryffindors assembling by a large tree.

Professor McGonnagal appeared, the color completely drained from her face, although her voice sounded as strong and dominant as usual when she called, "Silence! Raise your arms so I can count you, please."

Remus said, "Professor - "

"Not now, Mr. Lupin!"

After a minute she had finished counting, and looked troubled by the final number. "Does anyone not have all of their friends here?"

"Professor," Remus said again, and this time she looked over at him. She gasped, and he knew he didn't have to tell her who was missing. She knew exactly who would be standing with him if they were here.

"But Mr. Potter - Black - Miss Evans - _and _Pettigrew? My word - where are they?"

"Not me," said a wincy voice behind Remus, waving his hand in the air. He looked around and saw Peter. Remus was completely taken aback, but then he realized that Peter might have joined the crowd a while ago but not revealed himself. Perhaps because he had something to hide...

"But where were the others when you last saw them?" Professor McGonnagal asked.

Remus hesitated. "They were with me," he admitted. "At least James and Sirius were. Lily was in her room, though, and they went to go get her. They were worried she'd be left behind."

McGonnagal raised her eyes up in the air, and it was obvious what she was thinking before she said it. "Would it_ kill _Mr. Potter to get help from a teacher when things like this happen instead of having to be the hero himself?"

Remus got the idea she was probably thinking of the near-catastrophe last spring when Sirius had played his prank on Snape.

"How long ago was this?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "Fifteen minutes? We were the first to know what was going on."

She looked toward the castle fearfully, and then looked over to where Professors Constantine and Fangora were talking. She made her way over to them.

"Milo! Ellen!" she called breathlessly. "I have three students missing."

"Who?" asked Fangora.

"Potter, Evans, and Black."

"Yes, I'm short a Black as well," Constantine said in a regretful and serious, but not exactly worried, tone. "But one of his friends tells me he was talking about sneaking out of the castle tonight to practice flying on his broom. 'New rules be damned' were his exact words, apparently. I've sent Madam Higgins to check the Quidditch pitch for him. But my students don't seem worried about him."

"Of course they're not worried," Professor McGonnagal said darkly.

"Hm. What a thing to say," he said quietly.

"Oh, Milo - I didn't mean - " She looked around nervously, realizing that many students were listening in on their conversation. "Oh, we have no time for this! Ellen, you have all of your students here? What about Ravenclaw's?"

"They're all here," Fangora answered.

"All right. I'm going back inside - "

"Oh, Minerva - !"

"I'll have Horace come with me, he doesn't have students to look after. For the love of God, someone send Albus a message."

"I already did," Constantine assured her as she turned and ran away.

Professor Fangora glanced around her and met the faces of dozens of students who had overheard all of that and looked very frightened.

One person who had been standing very close to the three teachers and heard all they said was Sophia Stabbard, who was hidden within the crowd of Slytherins and had been struggling not to start a fight with anyone else in her House for the past five minutes she'd had to listen to their comments about this situation.

"Did I hear her say the Gryffindors are missing Sirius Black?" Rabastan Lestrange asked conversationally. "And two of his friends?"

"I believe so," Lucius Malfoy said in a voice that had a tint of amusement.

"My God, how unbelievably stupid," Bellatrix said, laughing. "They probably think they can face the Dark Lord all on their own."

"Do you think _he's _really here?" Narcissa asked her, looking toward the castle like the thought had her in awe.

Sophia didn't hear what Bellatrix said back because the next moment she had snuck away from the group, running behind the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs as all of the teachers' heads were turned and wouldn't notice her. She entered the group of Gryffindors from the back, getting quite a few strange looks as she nudged her way through to the front. She reached Remus Lupin's back, and tapped him on the shoulder.

Remus turned to see an extremely pale-faced, distressed-looking Sophia Stabbard. They stared at each other's faces a moment, their expressions establishing what exactly was happening here without them having to say it.

"Sirius is still in there? And James and Lily?" she asked quietly, her voice exposing clearly how scared she was.

Remus nodded, suddenly feeling very sorry for her, having to cross over to a group of students from another House to find someone else who cared that Sirius was in danger. He glanced around at the other students around him and saw that he seemed to be the only one who had noticed who she was; Peter was blocked by a tall student on Remus's left and couldn't even see her.

"I guess Lily was sick and she went up to bed early," he told her. "James and Sirius went up to get her because they were worried she wouldn't find out about the Dark Mark. But...they _should_ have gotten out by now..."

Sophia looked over at the castle and hugged her arms tightly around herself.

"Did you see it?" she asked. "The Dark Mark?"

He had followed her gaze to the school and didn't look away as he nodded.

"What do you think is going to happen? What are they going to...?"

Her voice trailed off; she could hardly bear thinking about it, much less saying it. Remus just said, "I don't know."

He looked to the side at Peter, who looked terrified, but had seemed to be avoiding looking at him ever since he made himself known in the crowd. He had gotten out of the castle just fine, after all, without his help. And suddenly he felt a deep loathing for himself. As he looked back up at the school, a vivid memory suddenly passed through his mind of his first day of school at Hogwarts, when Sirius and James had rescued him from being bullied. Then, the train ride back from school at the end of last year, when Lily had fallen asleep sitting next to him in the prefects compartment with her head on his shoulder. His third year, when Sirius once mocked Remus's piano playing by singing along to a jazz song in a deliberately terrible singing voice. And a random memory from last winter of Sirius and James wrestling with each other in the snow after Sirius had jinxed some snowballs to fly after him, playfully cursing at each other, as he and Peter watched them and laughed.

And after thinking about all those things, Remus suddenly felt like his heart was being torn right out of his chest as he stared at the enormous building that James, Sirius, and Lily still were still somewhere inside and in serious danger. And without thinking about it or even meaning to, he said quietly, "I should be in there with them."

Sophia looked at him with a meaningful expression, like she understood what he was thinking. Then she put her hand on his shoulder.

"Sirius and James are so smart," she said, her voice still hardly louder than a whisper. "They'll know what to do, they'll be okay. They _have_ to be."

It sounded like she was pulling at whatever small hope was available. She was squeezing his shoulder now, as if desperately waiting for assurance that she was right, and he nodded quickly. But he was only assuring himself as well.

Then - movement.

"Look!" Yvette shouted, pointing.

Two dark figures came from around one of the castle walls, then another three, moving more slowly behind them. As the two in front got closer, Remus saw that the two figures were actually three; James running forward as fast as he could with Lily on his back, and Sirius.

"YES!" cried Will once they came into view, which was followed by many loud exclamations and cheers from other students.

Remus felt so weighed-down with such immense relief that for a moment it was like he couldn't move. But as his friends came closer, he took off running to meet them. Lily saw him and dropped from James's back, running with them with her bare feet in the snow. When they all met they collided together, their arms all forming a circle as they hugged each other all at once, reunited as a group.

"Did you find Peter?" James asked.

"Oh," Remus remembered, "I...Yes." And practically on cue, Peter came forward and joined them with an enthusiastic smile, and he gestured at him. "Here he comes."

With Peter, Remus remembered Sophia. But when he looked back, he saw that she had vanished. He took a quick glance at the Slytherin students and thought he saw her head dissapearing behind Lucius Malfoy. He looked away before Sirius noticed, only to catch him looking that way himself. He wondered how much Sirius might have been worried about her throughout this whole ordeal, and almost said something to him. But if she wanted him to know, she wouldn't have run off as soon as she knew he was safe.

That made two people whose secrets he would be keeping for them tonight. He was so glad the others were safe he couldn't manage to be angry at Peter anymore. And he knew too much about wanting to keep the few friends one has to say anything.

Everyone's attention was only then turned to the others who had just come out of the school: Professor Marlewe, who had accompanied Progessor McGonnagal inside, was wandering off now that he was no longer needed. McGonnagal, curiously, was dragging a loudly complaining Regulus Black by the ear, looking so furious it seemed a wonder she wasn't melting the snow under her feet.

At the sight of a student from his House being treated this way, Professor Constantine came forward. "Minerva, what is the meaning of - ?"

"Oh, _here's_ your Death Eater, everyone," she said furiously, throwing Regulus forward for everyone to see. "His brother found him hiding behind a suit of armor in the same hall where the Dark Mark was, looking quite pleased with himself. _He _conjured the Dark Mark."

Gasps were heard from all around, and Professor Constantine looked genuinely shocked.

"I suppose you thought that was _extremely _amusing, Mr. Black?" she said. "Well, you won't find it so funny once Professor Dumbledore gets back and we figure out what we're going to do with you -"

"We?" Professor Constantine repeated. "As he is a student from my House, I believe the decision will be made by Albus and myself."

"Oh, do you really think it will make any difference?" she asked in disbelief. "That boy has just _begged_ to be expelled with no question!"

As he and McGonnagal continued to steam and shout, Lily was starting to jump up and down in the cold snow. James took his robes off and put them on the ground so she could stand on them and put his arms around her, trying to warm her up. "Great, now you're going to get more sick because of his brother's stupid joke."

Remus asked, "How did you guys find him? You ended up back outside the library?"

"Sirius was the one who found him," James explained. Then he looked at Sirius and pushed him a little angrily so that he almost fell back into the snow. "And you arsehole! You scared us! Lily and I thought you were right behind us, and then she noticed you weren't there and we had to turn back!"

"I...sorry," Sirius said rather pathetically. James shoved him again, but more playfully this time, and then stepped forward and gave him a strong hug.

"I would have told you guys, but I didn't notice his scent until we were halfway down the first flight of stairs. At once I kind of had an idea of what was up. But in case I was wrong, I thought I better let you two get out."

James gave a mix between a sigh and a shudder. "Padfoot..."

"Scent?" Peter asked, looking lost.

"Yeah," Sirius said, lowering his voice. "Lily had left her room, so I had to have Padfoot find her. Then as we were leaving I noticed somebody else's smell."

"It could have been a Death Eater!" James said.

"No," Sirius said in annoyance. "Don't you think I know my own brother's scent? I used to change into a dog so I could hide from my family under my bed for entire days. Anyway." He turned to Peter and Remus, who still didn't know the rest of the story. "I found my brother, heard Prongs galloping back up the stairs and started panicking a little because you were about to charge right up there with Lily riding on your back, an image so ridiculous I don't think he ever would have stopped laughing about it, not to mention he'd tell everyone he knew about it," he said to James, who started laughing. "So I took his wand, hung him up on one of the knight's staffs by his robes, and ran out there to stop James from rounding the corner before he was himself again. Although I'm sure Regulus is still confused about why it sounded like there was a horse inside the school. Then we heard Marlewe and McGonnagal shouting our names and dragged Regulus along with us to them."

All of them were giggling a little now, even though the situation was essentially not very funny at all; they were all so relieved that everything was okay and the whole thing hadn't been real that it was just coming out that way.

Many of the Slytherins far away were all having a laugh themselves, but for different reasons. As McGonnagal talked to Constantine and Marlewe, holding onto Regulus by the back of his robes as if he was going to try to run away, his friends shouted comments to him.

"You little liar, giving me some story about sneaking out of the castle when I asked where you were going! Nice one, Regulus!"

"Yeah, gave us a nice bit of entertainment," said a girl.

"How did you figure out how to conjure it, Regulus?"

"Will you lot _be quiet?" _Professor McGonnagal yelled, who was having trouble hearing the other teachers. Then looking at Regulus, she seemed to decide there was no point in keeping him there. "Oh, go on, I don't want to look at you anymore. Professor Constantine will deal with you later."

With that, she came forward and let go of his robes forcefully. Her tight grip on his clothes had actually been lifting him off the ground a little, and the release tossed him forward onto the ground where his face fell forward into the snow.

He looked up and met the face of Sophia Stabbard, who was standing right above him. She immediately got a firey look in her eyes and seemed to be trembling with anger, her hands balling into fists. Everyone went a little quiet as she took her wand out from inside her robes, but she just held it at her side for a moment instead of pointing it at him, thinking for just a moment. But then she lifted her high-heeled foot back and kicked it forward at him, just missing his face and splattering his whole head with snow.

As she turned and walked forcefully away, the other students called after her with mocking remarks, assuming she had been too scared to do what she really wanted to do him. Slytherins helped Regulus off the ground and brushed the snow off of him, shaking his hand and giving him pats on the back, but not in such a loud and animated matter that they brought attention to themselves.

Lily was going numb all over, freezing in her pajamas. Sirius, who was pretty good at warming charms, had done ones all over her, but they seemed to wear off after twenty seconds.

"Er..._Professor!" _James called to the congregation of adults many feet away.

As he had not said a name, half of the teachers glanced his way, but it was McGonnagal who irritably snapped, _"What?"_

"If you don't mind...Can we go inside now?"

All the teachers looked around, having been so involved in talking about the present matter with each other that they forgot about the students, and many of them looked like they now felt foolish for forgetting about them.

"All right then, back inside!" she said.

Lily sighed exasperatedly. "Boy, I can't wait to curl back up under those covers...I'm going _right _back to bed."

Sirius then said, "Oh, I _am _a dolt," realizing something only then, and pulled Lily's sweater out of his back pants pocket where it had been hanging from the whole time. He looked over it once, wiping his sleeve over a place where he spotted a little bit of dog slobber, and handed it to Lily. "There, that might make you a little warmer."

Lily spread it out to see exactly what it was and, recognizing it, stared at it as though she had never seen anything so strange in her life. "Where did this come from?"

James and Sirius laughed so hard that everyone else felt like they were missing out on something.


	17. With a Little Help From My Friends

By the time they were all seated at the breakfast table the next morning, word had already gotten around the school that Dumbledore had returned late last night. This was of a lot of interest to Sirius, who was expecting his brother to be expelled as soon as Dumbledore heard the explanation for the terror the whole school had been through last night. He had been wondering all of last night whether his mother and father might not take this news quite as well as they did the news that Sirius had been Sorted into Gryffindor House seven years ago, which had of course been not well at all.

"The thing I don't understand is how he knew how to do that spell," Remus said as they tucked into their toast and eggs.

"Well, nobody was thinking rationally at the time," Lily said, "but now that I remember it, it _wasn't _very authentic-looking, was it? Probably just some spell he made up. A real Dark Mark moves, but the snake was just sitting there. And it was really very small. The Death Eaters leave their sign _above _buildings, not inside them, and they can be seen from a mile away."

"But even an inanimate glowing skull is pretty good magic for a twelve-year-old," Sirius said. "Regulus isn't that smart. Although I suppose it's entirely possible that lots of Slytherins have been messing around and seeing how closely they can imitate the real thing. Maybe somebody showed him how he could do it."

"I imagine they won't be taking credit for it now," James said, "if they want to stay in school. Honestly, he must _not _be very bright. He should have known this would only get him in a load of serious trouble."

"He wasn't planning on getting caught, was he?" Remus said. His tone of voice sounded flat and unconcerned, like he was going along with the conversation but thinking about something else the whole time. Lily was the only one who seemed to be catching onto this, and kept trying to meet eyes with him across the table, like she knew he was hiding something.

Of course, he wasn't the one who was hiding something. Peter had been saying hardly a word all morning, like he was trying not to call any attention to himself at all. He was surely afraid one of his friends would think to ask him what had happened to him the whole time they were separated.

William Bell and the Doisneaus came and sat near them, and the two groups exchanged greetings. Then Arnaud said directly to Sirius, "Have you heard yet?"

"Heard what?" he asked.

"About your brother. See for yourself." He pointed across the Hall, and Sirius followed his gaze to the Slytherin table. There was Regulus dressed for another day of classes in his school robes, laughing with his friends and looking absolutely triumphant.

Sirius whipped back around to face the others. "No."

"Yes," Will said. "He gets to stay, but he got it pretty bad. Detention twice a week for the rest of the year as well as early curfew. He won't have privileges to go to Hogsmeade until he's sixteen."

"_And_ he'll never be able to play Quidditch," Yvette interjected.

"Which I understand he tried out for this year, if I'm not mistaken-"

"No!" Sirius said again, looking like he had not listened to any of what they just said. He was staring into thin air with a slightly mad look in his eyes, as if the whole world had just stopped making sense to him.

"Sirius," Lily said gently, "he _is _just a child."

"So what?"

"So he didn't understand what he was doing. He didn't understand the...implications of it."

"That's what you think because you've never stepped foot in my house," Sirius said bitterly. "You've never heard what casual dinner talk is for my family. Oh, he knew what he was doing!"

"That's exactly what I mean. He's been surrounded by adults who take these things lightly and talk about them over dinner his whole life," Lily tried to explain calmly. "That's why he doesn't understand the seriousness of it. He thought it would be funny."

"Oh, yeah," Sirius said darkly. "I bet Sarah Locket would have thought it was really funny. I bet the Kinkaids would have thought it was _really damn funny!"_

His raised voice was making many people look their way down the table. James put a hand on his shoulder lightly, which alone without a word seemed to calm him down a little. Then suddenly, James felt his shoulders sink, and his entire exterior seemed to tranform in a second, expressing a completely different emotion than before.

"Maybe it's my fault," he said quietly.

Lily's eyes filled with alarm. "What?"

"Regulus is an idiot who can't think for himself. He's always been that way. He always has to have somebody to look up to and_ imitate." _He stopped talking for a moment, his eyes seeming to be looking at something not there before him in that time. Then he went on in a lower voice, "He was my brother. He _was. _I used to be the one he looked up to. He wasn't supposed to turn out like this. I thought he wouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't have stopped paying attention to him so much after I came to school and had made so many friends..."

Lily reached across the table and rested her hand over his where it was sitting on the table. It seemed to pull him back into the present time; he looked up from the tabletop at everyone's faces again.

"He's still your brother," she said. "Now, you didn't really _want _him to get expelled, did you? Do you really think he deserves the treatment he'd get from your parents for that?"

"He's _not_ my brother anymore," Sirius said. "I don't know what happened to my little brother, but that little monster that did that thing yesterday, that was _not _him. And I had no problem with turning him in for it."

"He _is _young," James said. "If he made such a drastic change in the way he thinks when he started looking up to other students in his House, then he could change his mind about things again. He's just twelve."

"What about it?" Sirius asked. "When I was twelve I'd already figured out my family was full of rubbish. I would never have done something that idiotic and insensitive when I was twelve!"

There was a comical silence. Remus was the first to say, "Erm..."

Sirius sighed as the others laughed. "Okay, so I was an arsehole when I was twelve. But I know I would have taken all this...everything that's happened...seriously."

"Well," Remus said, reaching for some jam and getting back to finishing his breakfast before the food would disappear. "You are also a Gryffindor. He was Sorted into Slytherin. I imagine it takes a certain kind of character to be able to grow into a decent person even when you were raised in a family like that."

"Wouldn't it be nice if that were the case with me?" Sirius said, trying to make his tone jocular. But everyone caught the note of sadness in his voice and went quiet.

"Sirius, don't say that," Lily said. "You're nothing like them."

He didn't tell her that the assurance hardly meant anything to him coming from someone like her, who seemed to think badly of no one. For days he had not stopped thinking about some of the things Sophia had said to him when they split up and wondering if they were true. After all, being a good person was about more than simply being on the right side.

"Look," Peter said, pointing to the table where the teachers ate. Dumbledore had joined the table and was now rising to address the Hall.

"Young ladies and gentlemen," his voice rang out, gradually silencing everyone. "Needless to say, I am deeply saddened by the great tragedy that happened yesterday. Many great witches and wizards who were passionately devoted to protecting the Wizarding World were lost. Some of them were dear friends of mine, some old students who came to school here who I can still remember sitting in the seats you sit in now.

"But while I am disheartened, I am also very proud of the way the students in my school have dealt with this problem our world has suddenly become faced with. Although some may feel safer at home with their families during these times, only two of our students are to be leaving, and their parents are pulling them out of school against their wishes. That you are all here this morning ready to go on with your lessons and start another day despite the serious change that has just happened is something to admire. I was not here yesterday, but the detailed accounts of how you all reacted to the situation last night pleased me very much. You were brave and acted quickly, and you protected and helped one another."

For a moment it seemed like he was looking in the direction of where James and Sirius sat at their table. James wondered if Professor McGonagall might have told him about him and Sirius disobeying an order they were given for their safety by leaving the other students they had been with to help Lily. If they had not been the ones to catch Regulus, he wondered if they might have been punished for that.

"It is clear that I have many very capable and courageous young witches and wizards in this school," Dumbledore continued. "And indeed as I look at all of you now, I am yet full of hope. There is no telling how long this dispute will continue; it may very well be years before we can all feel safe again. But with so many Aurors gone, we will be in need of brave volunteers. I have already begun recruiting members for what shall be called the Order of the Phoenix, of which I will be the leader.

"And with that, I will leave you to your breakfast. I wish you all a pleasant day, and please do not hesitate to stop by my office if you fancy a chat."

As he sat back down, some were laughing at his last words, but Sirius, who had understood, said sarcastically, "Subtle."

And the five said nothing more to each other, although they seemed to know they were all thinking the same thing.

Owls started flying in the windows and filling the Hall, dropping a lot more post than usual into students' laps. Sirius was surprised when a very large one swooped past their table and dropped a big package on the table with his name on it.

"Who would have...?" Sirius wondered aloud as he ripped it open. When he saw it was a stack of brand new records, he stopped and smiled.

"Andromeda?" James assumed.

Sirius looked quickly at the records (T. Rex, Heart, the Who, Cream, and the Kinks) which he guessed Andromeda must have bought in one of the many cities she probably visited on her honeymoon with Ted. Then he saw that a letter was included. He opened it and started reading it, his eyes lighting up in surprise as they traveled along the words of the first couple paragraphs.

"Not bad news, I hope?" Remus asked.

"No," Sirius said a little absently, staring at the letter. "No. She's...pregnant."

"Oh," James said with a little relief. "Wow. This soon? Well...that's good, isn't it?"

Sirius nodded slowly, still not taking his eyes off of the words. "Yeah. It is." After looking up at the date written on the top of the piece of parchment, he finally put it down and looked up. "She sent this the day before it happened. She didn't know yet."

They were all silent for a few seconds. Then Sirius added, "But it's still good news. I mean...I guess life is really just going to go on, isn't it? Even if some people are going to die...well...more people are going to go on living."

Then they stayed silent, but some of them smiled a little at that, in a calm, accepting way.

For the rest of the day, they didn't talk about the coming war anymore, because now the fact that it was on all of their minds simultaneously was enough. They started smiling and talking about other things again, and Remus even forgot about what had tarnished his point of view of the strength of this circle of friends because of one apparently weak link. After all, he should have expected none of them would ever be quite as strong or brave on his own as they all were together.

* * *

In a couple days' time everything felt like it was almost completely back to normal. Most of the students that had gone home because of the loss of relatives returned to school. Once Professor Dumbledore decided it was safe for everyone to go outside again, the new safety rules were no longer in effect. This happened perfectly on time for the weather to start getting warmer. The lake, which had been completely frozen days ago, now had only some chunks of ice left floating on the surface of it. The trees were glistening with the melting snow, their wet branches making them sparkle in the bright sun in a way that made it seem they had lights hung on them. 

A few hours after classes were done, Sirius was outside on the second story atrium that went around the courtyard, leaning over on the short wall and looking down at the grass that was starting to peak through what was left of the snow. It was the first day he had been able to be comfortable outside in just his uniform dress shirt and no outer robes. He was wearing his Muggle style aviator sunglasses, the ones his mother had shouted at him for wearing once and almost taken away from him, and thinking very deeply about a lot of things as he stared down at the courtyard.

It felt like it had been winter for forever. He couldn't believe they had another half of a school year still in front of them, even with everything that had changed. There would be Quidditch matches. There would be more exploring during full moons. Even with a war going on outside this castle, there would still be some of those nights that he and his friends just didn't feel like going to bed and would stay up until midnight in the common room laughing hard about silly little things that wouldn't even seem that funny the next morning.

His thoughts wandered idly and fell on his brother, and a random memory surfaced in his head of a time when Regulus was very little and Sirius accidentally slammed a door shut on his fingers. Sirius had hugged him tightly for a long time and kept saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to" until he stopped screaming and crying. From there, his mind went to the first time he came to stay with James's family for the summer, memories of him and James playing on brooms in the backyard and Mrs. Potter coming outside in bright sundresses to bring them lemonade or cookies she had just baked. Then a day in his fourth year when Sirius had said a smart comment about Professor Constantine under his breath during his class that Lily heard and which threw her into uncontrollable fits of laughter, and it was when he exchanged a smile with her afterwards that he first realized he and Lily Evans had become friends. The first time she ever hugged him, excitedly after he brought her a book she'd left in a classroom and had apparently needed badly, it had felt a little strange and he had immediately thought of his mother who he could hardly remember ever touching him. He thought of what Andromeda had said about how foolish it may be for the both of them to think they could just run completely away from their family and not be a part of it anymore. Words like "brother" and "mother" that he had thought meant nothing to him anymore but were not, after all, completely lost.

A soft voice behind him said, "Hey, Padfoot." Remus came up at his side and leaned on the wall beside him. "Nice sunglasses."

"Thanks," Sirius said with a smirk.

"It's nice and quiet here," Remus said. "Everyone else is outside by the lake and Lily and James already have their hands full enforcing rules and taking House points away."

Sirius laughed. Then they both stood there in silence for a while, gazing down at the ground many feet below. Then Sirius said in a tone that gave Remus the idea he had been thinking about how to begin saying this for a while, "Moony, I feel a little bad about something. There's something I think I should have told you."

Remus had no idea what he could mean. "About what?"

Sirius hesitated, like he didn't know if he should bring this up on a day that had started out perfectly bright. "About Madelin Wood."

Remus seemed to turn to stone, his face showing nothing. That was certainly not what he had expected to hear.

"I mentioned to you that I had Defence Against the Dark Arts class with her in third year," Sirius began. At Remus's nod, he continued, "Yeah. Definitely a bright girl. She was always impressing Professor Marlewe and taking points for Hufflepuff in that class, when she overcame her shyness enough to raise her hand. Anyway...we studied Boggarts that year. The day Marlewe introduced the subject, he gave us a whole class period to write eight inches about what a Boggart would turn into if it faced us and what we would do to defend ourselves from it. He left us to our work and everybody started talking about the assignment. And I overheard Madelin behind me talking to her friend...Stella something..."

"Selena Sterling?"

"That's the one. Yeah. Selena didn't sound very sure about what her greatest fear would be, but as Madelin was telling her, she had no doubt what the Boggart would turn into." Sirius paused, turning to look at Remus's face. "See, she said when she was seven years old she was attacked by a werewolf. It was a wizard who lived three houses down from them who her family had never even known was one. Another neighbor was able to rescue her right away and she was very lucky not to have been bitten deeply enough to be contaminated. But she'd had nightmares about the experience ever since.

"She went on to explain how her parents had informed the Ministry of what had happened and tried to have the werewolf arrested. They thought it was his responsibility to inform everyone of his condition for their safety. But as it turned out, she had been playing outside with her brothers and stolen something of theirs as a joke and was looking for some place to hide it, so she climbed over the fence into the man's backyard. He kept himself chained up there during each full moon and used sound-proofing spells on the area so nobody would hear him in there.

"The Ministry couldn't do anything about him, but of course her parents let all the witch and wizard families in the neighborhood know what had happened, and soon after that he moved away."

He left everything at that for a while, and Remus had the feeling he wanted to see what he thought of this so far. After he hadn't said anything more for a few seconds, Remus said, "Maybe he should have been even more careful than that."

"Maybe Madelin shouldn't have been trespassing into her neighbor's yard," Sirius said. "Maybe her parents should have kept a better watch over their kids and not let them go playing around the neighborhood after dark. After she told the story I heard Selena say something like, 'You know, I've never understood why the Ministry just lets dangerous monsters like those run free. They should all be locked up or something,' and Madelin agreed with her."

Sirius turned around and leaned back against the wall, looking to the side at Remus. "So I'm sorry if I didn't seem very supportive of the idea of the two of you going out together. I kept thinking all along that I should maybe say something about what I knew. But I thought it may never get serious enough for things like that to matter anyway, and you seemed really happy. I guess I didn't want to ruin it. But...in the end, I'm the one who ruined it anyway, aren't I?"

Remus looked up at him. "Don't be thick."

Sirius looked embarassed. He picked at something under one of his fingernails and wouldn't look at Remus's face. "Well...it does all kind of come back to..."

"Severus Snape."

He almost didn't say it. When he did, it just barely came out. "Because I almost let you kill him."

There had never once been a word about this between the two of them before. But Remus was prepared for it.

"Look, you've done some really stupid things, Padfoot," he said, "but so have I."

"You?" Sirius said incredulously.

"Yes, I have. One day when you're older and not such a dumb brute I'll explain it to you."

Sirius laughed and elbowed him in the side.

"But why don't you think about this?" Remus continued. "Bad people don't sit around beating themselves up for the stupid things they've done and wondering if they're bad people for doing them."

Sirius's smile faded and he looked serious again, although without seeing his eyes Remus couldn't quite read his emotions. The sunglasses hid what he was really thinking, even better than his own eyes usually could.

"The point is..." Remus looked back away from him into the sun. "It's not that I wouldn't forgive you anyway, but I think that there are already enough people who can't forgive you for that one thing. And you've been punished more than enough already."

Sirius was silent for a long time. And as if he knew exactly what his last words had caused him to think of, Remus said, "And I'm sorry things didn't work out for you either in the romance department. But about Madelin...well...It's strange, but I don't think it would have hurt me any less no matter how it ended, or when. You don't have anything to feel bad about."

"Oi!" called a voice from an entrance into the atrium. James had just come outside and was walking over to them. "What are you blokes talking about, eh?"

"Oh, the usual bloke stuff," Remus said casually. "Quidditch, whisky, women..."

At the same time James and Sirius broke out into loud laughter that echoed against the stone walls of the courtyard.

"Moony...you're a Prefect," James finally said, getting to the reason he had come looking for him.

"Is he really?" Sirius said in a sarcastically shocked voice, making them all start laughing again.

"Oh, yes. And there's a bunch of First and Second Year kids who have borrowed brooms from older students and are flying all over the place and falling in the lake cause they don't know what they're doing. Lily and I can't catch them all and get them down."

"Oh, and I suppose you want my help?" Remus presumed.

"Well - "

"Meaning you want me to take over in your stead because you're miserable at this disciplining and responsibility thing?"

"Well..."

"I think maybe I could be of some assistance."

As he walked off, James called, "Now, you tell Lily you're the one who put the words in my mouth! It wasn't _my _idea to refuse to come back down..."

"Right, of course," Remus mumbled, waving a hand at them as he dissapeared into the building.

James and Sirius laughed once more, both turning and leaning on the wall to gaze down at the same view Sirius and Remus had been looking at. James looked to the side at him and smiled.

"I remember when we bought those sunglasses," he said.

"You mean when you bought them for me," Sirius corrected.

"Yeah, well, you're too much of a dimwit with Muggle currency so I took care of it. And for how clever you are, you're too lazy to figure out how to convert the price into Galleons and pay me back."

Sirius smiled. "That was a fun summer," he reflected musingly.

"Yeah," James agreed. "Was that last?"

He nodded.

"Yeah. That was when there were those two weeks or so that we kept going to the cinema to see _Star Wars _every day. Remember?"

"Of course. Until your dad decided we were being mad and stopped giving us money."

"And then I think we even snuck in a couple times."

"Did we? I remember trying to convince you we should."

"I think we did." James paused, remembering all the details about that month. "And we scared my mum to death with that fake talking goblin head we left in the refridgerator."

Sirius slapped the stone he was leaning on, barking with laughter. "Oh, that was brilliant!"

Their laughter died down and they were left with the silence of the peaceful day, pierced every once in a while with the singing of some birds far away or the distant laughter of kids inside. It was a very long time before either of them spoke again, long enough for what remained of their reminiscing from moments before to be forgotten and replaced with new thoughts. But of course, what Sirius's mind drifted back to were more familiar than new thoughts.

"Girls," he said suddenly, and that was all.

James seemed to understand perfectly how whatever was going on in his friend's mind had come to that word. He just kept staring forward and said quietly, "I know."

Sirius sighed, adjusting his sunglasses, for they had started slipping down his nose as he peered downward. "Figures she would be the only one who ever really mattered, though. You know...Sophia."

James said nothing, only nodded.

"But I guess you could say I kind of had it coming to me," he added, trying a pathetic laugh.

James looked up at him. "I wouldn't say that."

"Why not?" Sirius asked, obviously trying to keep his tone light-hearted. "You're the one who was always-"

"Because. You're my best mate."

That stopped him.

"I'm sorry as hell about what happened. I'd never think you deserved it," James said.

Sirius straightened his posture. He took off his sunglasses and his eyes squinted in the bright light. "Well, thanks, Prongs."

"Any time, mate. Now, if you ever want to talk about exactly what happened - "

"No, it really doesn't matter anymore."

James looked at him skeptically.

"Well, I mean it _does_. But there were just some things she said that shook me a little. It seems stupid now. Besides..." He stopped a moment, and then his voice got quieter when he said, "She may not have even meant it."

Somehow, he knew this to be true. He had said a lot of things to Sophia himself that he hadn't meant, after all, when he was just angry that she had proven him wrong about something and not thinking right. They were both so alike, both so proud and stubborn, and completely incapable of giving up and letting the other win. That was why it could never have worked.

But memories still pulled him away from accepting that time as gone, of the cold wind brushing her hair against his face as he kissed her on their walks around the grounds. Thinking about it and analyzing it had made some things more clear, but only time would heal everything.

When he didn't say anything more, James gave him a hearty pat on his back. "Come on, Padfoot. It's almost dinner time."

"Wait," Sirius said. "There's something else I _do _want to talk to you about."

James had been turning to go back inside, and he stopped still. "What's that?"

Sirius looked directly into his friend's face. "What do you think of this Order of the Phoenix business?"

"I knew you were going to bring that up sometime," James said with a small grin. "That's why I already talked to Professor Dumbledore."

Sirius returned the smile. "So did I. And I got the feeling you already had because of the way he smiled at me when I came into his office."

"Like he expected that if I wanted to join, you would have to as well?"

"Naturally."

There was a moment of silent understanding. Then James finally said, "When we tell the others, you know they'll want to follow us. They'll say so right away."

"Well, of course Lily will," Sirius said. "There's no way she would let you go out risking your life on dangerous missions without her getting to come along, too."

James didn't smile at that; instead he looked very serious. "Peter and Remus both will want to join, too."

"Do you think?" Sirius asked with the smallest tint of doubt.

But James sounded absolutely sure. "Yes. Just think of all we've been through together already, the five of us. And before last year, the four of us. You don't share things like that only to be separated in times when you should be holding together the most."

"Yes, I suppose not," Sirius agreed.

"Can you really see any of us doing anything else? We weren't even sure what we were going to do after school, right? But we've stuck with the general classes and Dumbledore says we're perfectly qualified to get Auror training, and even if we weren't they'll undoubtably be loosening the requirements right now. Even Peter will be fine if he wants to do it."

Sirius smiled. "Now _that's _something I never would have imagined happening. Peter, an Auror...So have you talked to Lily about these plans yet?"

An expression crossed James's face that gave the strong impression he had never thought to do so. "Not really. I don't think I really need to. She's already got the same thing on her mind."

"Yeah, I bet she does." Sirius paused, crossing his arms. "Let's give it a while before we start talking about this with them. I've been rather enjoying not thinking about it for the time being...It's a nice day, isn't it?"

James looked out at the sunny skies and just nodded his agreement before they went back into the castle together.


	18. Castles Made of Sand

**Author's Notes: **In the summer of 2003 I started writing my first Harry Potter fanfic, "Preludes," which was about the events in the Marauders' lives that lead up to the infamous "Prank." I hadn't finished reading OotP when I started it, so some of the characters were not written quite right, but I ended up still a little attached to my characterizations of MWPP and Lily and kept them the same when I started writing this sort of spin-off of the fic in the beginning of 2004, a story about the _after-effects _of Sirius's prank. I knew all along it is just about the least "marketable" kind of fanfic I possibly could have written: dreadfully long, not dirty enough to hold a lot of the typical kind of fic readers' attention, focusing on relationships with original characters nobody else cares about and might as well be Mary Sues (never mind if they don't stay together in the end and the romance isn't the point), and with some of the characters almost unrecognizably OOC. I could hardly get anyone to start reading it.

But still I liked the story, and I wanted to finish it, even if nobody but my sister would ever read the whole thing. There was a point in time when I seemed to have lost motivation to keep writing it and honestly didn't think I would end up finishing it. But I guess it wouldn't leave me alone; there were a lot of things I had left open and hanging at the place I stopped. I _vowed_ that I would finish the thing before the release of DH, worried that the final book would make the whole thing suddenly not even near canon. But that date came so much sooner than I expected, and at 2:00 AM on July 22 there was only one scene left in this fic I had to write and I was sitting with the book in my hands. I read four pages, but for some reason just couldn't get completely into it. I put it down for a while and finally realized that maybe I just didn't feel ready because I hadn't finished "Requiems" like I wanted to. So feeling like I'd gone out of my mind, instead of reading the new Harry Potter I wandered to the computer and wrote fic instead.

And here it is, in all its completely-un-canon-but-at-least-FINISHED glory. If you are reading this and have actually followed this fic all the way through to the end, I seriously love you. :) Thank you.

* * *

The next day brought the beginning of a slow, leisurely weekend. Possibly out of some sensitivity to most people's inability to concentrate on schoolwork quite as well as usual, many of the teachers had been giving less work lately, so many students found themselves not having much to do that Saturday. Most decided to enjoy the warmer weather outside, and in the afternoon that day the Gryffindor common room was sparcely inhabited and quiet, filled only with the low murmering of speech between small groups. The five friends were all occupying the same couch; James was lying lazily across Lily's lap, Sirius was sitting on the back of the couch with his feet behind James's legs, Peter was sitting on the floor leaning back against it, and Remus was squeezed in next to Lily. Yvette Doisneau was sharing a large chair with Will Bell near them. 

"So is your family doing okay, Lily?" Remus asked, for she had gotten her second letter from her parents that week delivered to her that morning in the Great Hall, but for some reason had put it away and refrained from reading it right away. He could only assume she had read it in private by now.

"Huh?" Lily responded absently, like she didn't understand what would make him ask that. But then she answered vaguely, "Oh, yes, they're fine. Pretty shocked by this whole thing, of course, but all right."

"Has Petunia had the braces taken off yet?" Sirius asked lightly. "Or does she want to keep them to make more designs on the wall?"

All the boys laughed. James felt Lily's stomach stay still and could tell she wasn't laughing for a reason; he sat up from her lap and looked up at her, but she didn't meet his gaze.

The others seemed to catch onto this, for they stopped laughing and got respectfully quiet again. After a while Will said, "Hey, Sirius, why don't you put some music on? You haven't been playing your records much for a while."

Sirius's face slowly lit up a little, like he couldn't believe the thought hadn't already occured to him. Not needing any more convincing, he lifted his legs over the over side of the couch and slid off of the back. He walked over to where his turntable still sat on its endtable, something about its appearance speaking of neglect even though it certainly wasn't close to gathering dust. And a moment later his friends heard the needle placed down, and a mellow song by the Association started to play. Will said something quiet into Yvette's ear and then they got up and went to a corner of the room. They circled their arms close around each other and started swaying slowly to the music with their cheeks together and their eyes closed.

James put his arm around Lily's shoulders and she knew he was going to ask her if she wanted to dance, too. But when she turned her face to look at him, something in her eyes stopped him.

"Are you all right?" he asked quietly.

She nodded.

"You sure?"

She nodded again, more assuringly. "I just need to go for a walk around the grounds."

He knew somehow that she meant by herself.

"Then I want to talk to you," she said. "Come and look for me in half an hour."

James smiled and looked at his watch. "I'm counting."

"Then I want to fly around the Quidditch pitch with you," she said. "And then I want to dance with you later when we're alone."

"Shall I think of some items to add to that list while you're gone?"

"If you wish," she said with a giggle. Then she kissed his cheek, rose from the couch and left the common room.

The slow song ended, and as soon as the next started Sirius seemed to have decided that record wasn't working out for him and changed it to something louder. On came the same song he had played at full volume to wake up everyone in James's house on New Year's Day. Recalling that morning immediately brought a smile to James's face.

"Moony!" Sirius said in a loud, grabbing voice that made Remus's shoulders jump. "Get up! Today you're going to learn how to do the mashed potato."

"On no-" Remus protested feebly as he was grabbed by the arm and pulled up from the couch by Sirius.

James laughed hard. He knew enough about Muggles from his father's family to know that it would be quite unusual for any Muggle to dance the mashed potato to this kind of music, but he decided not to spoil Sirius's fun or his own that he would have from watching this by telling him so.

And indeed, it was great to watch Sirius try to get Remus to start dancing at all.

"Come on, move your hips! Like this!" Sirius said, his hips swooshing from side to side in what was actually a very good demonstration of the dance.

"I _am_ moving my hips," Remus said matter-of-factly.

"Look down at your bloody feet, mate. Do something with them."

"Does this have any purpose?"

"Yes. In Muggle culture, being a good dancer is an absolutely necessary trait a man must exhibit in order to impress and woo a girl."

"And for gorillas, jumping up and down and punching your chest like a complete moron is the same thing, but you aren't suggesting I learn how to do that."

Peter and James laughed. Sirius stopped dancing and puts his hands on his hips. "Oh yeah, what are you implying? That I look like a moron?"

Remus shrugged and Sirius pushed him backward so that his knees bumped against the arm of the couch and he fell backwards into it, and then all of them were laughing.

Suddenly it seemed like a perfectly normal weekend for the moment. William told a dirty joke he'd made up about a vampire shopping in a ladies' robes shop that got five people in the room falling to the floor with laughter. Frank Longbottom was playing Wizard Chess with Polly Prewett and halfway through he got into a loud but friendly argument with her over a move she'd made. After a while Remus said he had a letter he needed to send to his parents, so he left the common room to go to the owlery. Things were winding down and getting more quiet when the record came to a sad song called "Castles Made of Sand," which James felt strangely like he was the only one paying attention to as he sat on the couch looking into the fireplace. The lyrics talked about dreams dying, things that seemed indestructible easily falling apart, and death. Even over the sound of everyone talking, it filled the room like a requiem that demanded attention and respect for those lost.

Death was always hovering over everyone even in these moments that seemed normal. But it was now more an ackowledgement of the deaths to come that haunted James the most, not the ones that had already happened.

He looked to the side at Sirius and Peter, who were also staring in the fire with blank, tired expressions, like all of their playing around from earlier had tired them out. James looked at his watch, and then he stood up to leave.

* * *

When Lily reached the first floor, she saw that the doors going outside at the end of the long corridor were open, filling this part of the castle with more bright light than usual. Many students, she saw, seemed to be coming inside or on their way out. Her mind went to the matter that had been on her mind all day, and that thought made her reach into her bag to get out the letter she had gotten from home that morning. While she was distracted looking for it, she didn't see the trails of water and mud on the floor from students coming in from outside, and gasped when she slipped on a wet spot and started falling forward. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone who had just been walking past rush toward her and just in time, he was able to catch her. Lily looked up at who it was and nearly gasped again.

Snape looked just as shocked, seeming to feel disoriented and like he wasn't sure how he had ended up in this position now. As if suddenly appalled by their closeness, he practically threw Lily off of him and immediately looked away from her face, darting off to keep walking the way he had been headed at a much faster pace than before.

Her eyes wide, Lily watched him walking away for a few seconds and then ran after him.

"Severus," she said once she'd caught up to him.

As if he hadn't heard her, he just kept walking.

"Severus, _stop._"

"What do you want, _Evans_?" he said, turning to her with a vexed expression.

She just looked at him a moment, her shoulders visibly rising with her breaths. Then she just shook her head as if in great disappointment. "I don't understand you," she said. "How can someone so inherently decent act so cruelly? And you must not even have the faintest idea how much harm your actions have meant for my friends."

"You mean how much harm they have brought upon themselves?" he asked. "All I did was tell Sophia the truth."

"You don't even _know _the truth. Not entirely. For God sakes, she was your friend before. And you used her to get back at Sirius in a completely insensitive way. She really loved him, you know."

"Would it have been better if she learned about it later?" he demanded of her.

That stopped Lily. She stared at him like she was now noticing something she didn't know how she'd missed before.

"You didn't only do it for your selfish revenge," she said quietly. "That's just what you'd like me to think. You didn't want her with someone who's no good for her. You did it out of _caring_ for her."

Snape just smirked at her mockingly. "You are so insipidly weak, Evans. You cannot face and accept the way things really are. You see only what you want to in people."

"_As do you!_" she said back angrily. "To still despise James and all who are associated with him so much after all this time when he risked his own life to save yours. He may not be perfect, but he is _not _who you think he is."

"I will leave it up to you to look past Potter's tremendous flaws. But _someone, _after all, must still ackowledge them."

She smiled at him just a little, and it suddenly felt like they were in some kind of battle of wit; he had a bit of a point. Snape, however, looked at her as unpleasantly as ever.

"I'm just scared for you, Severus," Lily admitted. "Very bad things are coming our way. There is going to be a possibly devastating war. I just hope you won't end up on the wrong side."

Snape stepped a little closer to her, his face very serious. "This world is not divided the way you think it is, Evans. Believe me when I say I would much rather be on any other side than the same as Black and your good-for-nothing piece of filth of a boyfriend."

Lily stared into his eyes, her face falling into a dark frown. As she started to look a little sad, Snape's face changed as well, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Then Lily turned and started walking back toward the doors. Snape watched her go for only a couple seconds before he turned to leave as well.

* * *

James found her outside sitting on a large rock by the lake where he now remembered she and him had shared a significant moment in the days they had started to fall in love. She was holding a letter in her lap, but not reading it; she had already read over it several times. 

When he sat next to her, she looked up at him with a kind of smile that was very warm but still hinted at a feeling of sadness. She reached up and touched his face, and he leaned over and kissed her softly. When they broke apart, he looked down at the letter and asked, "Are you okay?"

She nodded. "Yeah. I think so." She held up the letter for a second. "It's from Petunia."

James hadn't known that her sister had written her, and this surprised him. "What does she have to say?"

She took a moment to answer, and he could tell from the look in her eyes it was nothing good to hear. "I wrote my mum and dad and her and told them I might be interested in joining the Order of the Phoenix, and explained what that's all about. But she wrote me back herself and said that she thinks I'm being crazy and selfish for making myself so vulnerable when things are this dangerous. She thinks I should be considering how...me fighting against this powerful dark Wizard could put my family in danger." She looked down at the letter, clearly upset enough that it was a little difficult to talk about it, and James reached for her hand and clasped it tightly. "Then she goes on about how she never liked all this magic business and it seems insane to still want to be a part of this world when it's obvious now how twisted and dangerous it is, and that I should just see reason and come home and...well, forget all about it."

James took all of that in for a moment. He then asked, "But your parents...they haven't said anything about feeling this way?"

She shook her head. "No. They're very scared for me, of course, but no. I doubt my sister has even shared with them that she is asking me to do this."

James looked forward in thought, and she set the letter aside on the rock and stood up to stare out at the wide, sparkling surface of the lake, crossing her arms pensively. He stood up and joined her by her side.

"The thing is...I almost agree with her. In some ways, I think it _would _be nice to be able to just forget about it. Wouldn't it be nice if we all could just wake up in our safe beds, in a safe world, and find that all of this was a dream?"

He nodded.

"But what Petunia doesn't understand is that it really doesn't make any difference whether or not I decide to deny that I perhaps have a responsibility to do what I can to help my kind. This war...if we lose, it could affect everybody. And even without...You-Know-Who. _Voldemort. _Even without him, it's not a completely safe world to live in anywhere. So I may as well stay here, where I've learned to feel at home."

James turned to face her a little. "But if you could go back and get your Hogwarts acceptance letter again, and make that choice again...would you still decide to learn to be a Witch, knowing what price would come with it? Would you maybe even think about not doing it?"

She looked to the side at him, her eyes suddenly full of emotion, and right then they both knew what they were each thinking: if they had never decided to become part of this world, they never would have met each other. It was hard to believe that something about their lives would not have just seemed empty and wrong.

"Oh, James...not for a moment," she said.

Looking at her, James seemed to melt into nothing but intense feelings, and he pulled her to him and held her tightly. "Lily, I love you."

Her eyes were glimmering with some tears as she rested her head close against his chest. "I love you, too."

She pulled back away from him enough to look up into his face, and he leaned down and kissed her, slowly and deeply, for what felt like an unmeasurable amount of time, something that would stretch on for forever even after they were no longer standing here together, even after they both had taken their last breath.

Then Lily pulled back and they just looked into each other's faces, hands still in each other's hair.

"I'm not afraid of what could happen to us anymore," James told her. "If the rest of my life could be short, I don't want to waste any more of it worrying about losing what I have."

Lily nodded, smiling. "Me, too."

Then he said, "I only just now decided I want to ask you this, and this is kind of crazy. But will you marry me?"

Her eyes went side in shock; James grinned widely, laughing a little at himself. Then Lily threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly, which James thought he could assume was a positive answer, and he hugged her back happily, rocking her back and forth.

The sky was burning in a beautiful sunset and the surface of the lake reflected red and gold brightly. Both of them, so full of happiness and love then, felt like they were filled with a warmth and a light that would make it not so hard to go into even the most frightening and dark night. Tomorrow did not matter. There was today.

**THE END**


End file.
